Tomas Veloz: History and new perspectives in quantum cognition

11th ECCO/GBI Seminar Series (2015-2016)
History and new perspectives in quantum cognition

September 25, 2015, Brussels
Tomas Veloz
University of British Columbia

Abstract:
Information processing at a conceptual level is considered to be one of the hardest challenges in Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence. While computer scientists and engineers have focused on developing advances for particular tasks, philosophers and cognitive scientists have focused on elucidating the structural nature of meaning. A remarkable bridge between these two limited-success approaches can be found in behavioral research, since, in a variety of tasks, humans process information at a conceptual level in a way that is incompatible with classical probability and fuzzy set theory. Recently, this incompatibility has been shown to occur at a deep structural level, and attempts have been made to use mathematical schemes founded on quantum structures as alternative approaches. For this reason, the application of quantum structures to this type of phenomena has received increasing attention. The quantum approach to cognition allows to faithfully model a number of non-classical deviations observed in experimental data. Moreover, it shows that genuine quantum theoretical notions, such as contextuality, superposition, emergence and entanglement, are interesting epistemic tools to understand and represent hard problems in Artificial Intelligence. In this talk, we identify some of the limitations of classical theories to handle some important cognitive tasks, introduce the fundamentals of this quantum cognitive approach, and discuss its possible applications.