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Quantum Structure in Cognition: Why and How Concepts Are Entangled

  • Conference paper
Quantum Interaction (QI 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 7052))

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Abstract

One of us has recently elaborated a theory for modelling concepts that uses the state context property (SCoP) formalism, i.e. a generalization of the quantum formalism. This formalism incorporates context into the mathematical structure used to represent a concept, and thereby models how context influences the typicality of a single exemplar and the applicability of a single property of a concept, which provides a solution of the Pet-Fish problem and other difficulties occurring in concept theory. Then, a quantum model has been worked out which reproduces the membership weights of several exemplars of concepts and their combinations. We show in this paper that a further relevant effect appears in a natural way whenever two or more concepts combine, namely, entanglement. The presence of entanglement is explicitly revealed by considering a specific example with two concepts, constructing some Bell’s inequalities for this example, testing them in a real experiment with test subjects, and finally proving that Bell’s inequalities are violated in this case. We show that the intrinsic and unavoidable character of entanglement can be explained in terms of the weights of the exemplars of the combined concept with respect to the weights of the exemplars of the component concepts.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Krijgskundestraat 33, B-1160, Brussels, Belgium

    Diederik Aerts & Sandro Sozzo

Authors
  1. Diederik Aerts
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  2. Sandro Sozzo
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing, The Robert Gordon University, St. Andrew Street, AB25 1HG, Aberdeen, U.K.

    Dawei Song

  2. Department of Information Engineering, University of Padua, Via Gradenigo 6/B, 35131, Padova, Italy

    Massimo Melucci

  3. Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Bedfordshire, Park Square, LU1 3JU, Luton, UK

    Ingo Frommholz

  4. School of Computing, The Robert Gordon University, St. Andrew Street, AB25 1HG, Aberdeen, UK

    Peng Zhang  & Lei Wang  & 

  5. School of Computing, University of Glasgow, 18 Lilybank Gardens, G 128 QQ, Glasgow, UK

    Sachi Arafat

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© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Aerts, D., Sozzo, S. (2011). Quantum Structure in Cognition: Why and How Concepts Are Entangled. In: Song, D., Melucci, M., Frommholz, I., Zhang, P., Wang, L., Arafat, S. (eds) Quantum Interaction. QI 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7052. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24971-6_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24971-6_12

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-24970-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-24971-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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