Experimental evidence for quantum structure in cognition

Diederik Aerts

pp. 59-70

in: Peter Bruza, Donald A. Sofge, William F. Lawless (eds), Quantum interaction, Berlin, Springer, 2009

Abstract

We prove a theorem that shows that a collection of experimental data of membership weights of items with respect to a pair of concepts and its conjunction cannot be modeled within a classical measure theoretic weight structure in case the experimental data contain the effect called overextension. Since the effect of overextension, analogue to the well-known guppy effect for concept combinations, is abundant in all experiments testing weights of items with respect to pairs of concepts and their conjunctions, our theorem constitutes a no-go theorem for classical measure structure for common data of membership weights of items with respect to concepts and their combinations. We put forward a simple geometric criterion that reveals the non classicality of the membership weight structure and use experimentally measured membership weights estimated by subjects in experiments from [26] to illustrate our geometrical criterion. The violation of the classical weight structure is similar to the violation of the well-known Bell inequalities studied in quantum mechanics, and hence suggests that the quantum formalism and hence the modeling by quantum membership weights, as for example in [17] , can accomplish what classical membership weights cannot do.