Jerome Busemeyer , Ph.D.

What Is Quantum Cognition, and How Can It Be Used to Model Behavior in Cognitive Sciene?

Cognitive scientists face some of the same types of problems that forced physicists to abandon classical dynamics. Their measurements are often incompatible, and the first measurement may disturb a second measurement. Thus only partial information about a complex system can be obtained at any point in time. Combining partial information about a system into a coherent understanding of the entire system is the hallmark of quantum theory. Quantum theory provides a fundamentally different approach to logic, reasoning, and probabilistic inference. For example, quantum logic does not always follow the distributive axiom of Boolean logic; quantum probabilities do not always obey the Kolmogorov law of total probability; quantum reasoning does not always obey the principle of monotonic reasoning. For this talk, I will present the basic assumptions of classic versus quantum information processing theories. These basic assumptions will be examined, side by side, in a parallel and elementary manner. Classic theory will emerge as a possibly overly restrictive case of the more general quantum theory. The fundamental implications of these contrasting assumptions for modeling cognition will be examined.