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Greatly improved predictions across very diverse cognitive psychology experiments. For the actual papers see (http://www.thedocc.com/publications-2/ http://www.

Greatly improved predictions across very diverse cognitive psychology experiments. For the actual papers see (http://www.thedocc.com/publications-2/ http://www.thedocc.com/publications-2/).

eli_gottlieb 11y ago
This sounds less like the mathematics behind quantum mechanics (eg: negative amplitudes) are themselves relevant, and more like quantum mechanics "bakes in" the kind of resource-bounded processing and causal structure that we expect good theories of cognition to have. Last I've heard, probabilistic modelling of cognition - with resource-bounded processing and causal modelling in place of "pure" probability theory - has been a fairly successful research program. What advantage does quantum "complex" probability have over that, or over some generalizing to a measure theory with an arbitrary norm?
- jedharris 11y ago
  This may answer your question: Bayesian comparison of a quantum versus a traditional model of human decision making http://www.thedocc.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/J24.-BuseWangShiffrin2015Bayesian.pdf http://www.thedocc.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/J24.-BuseW...
  - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
    That mostly doesn't help, due to the fact that, as I understand the term, standard "decision theories" are intended as normative theories, meaning that when real behavior deviates, the investigators write the behavior off as wrong for failing to conform to theory, instead of trying to come up with a theory that actually describes the behavior. So if you end up comparing an even-loosely-descriptive theory to a normative one, the descriptive theory will win, every time, no matter how far it is from true accuracy. That is, if you line up prospect theory, standard normative decision theory, and some new descriptive theory, the latter will definitely win in a model selection. But that doesn't tell us how the quantum descriptive theory compares to, for instance, the causal-probabilistic descriptive theory.
  - jedharris 11y ago
    I don't understand your point in comparing this work to normative decision theories. The work is explicitly modeling experimental results that have been hard to model with existing probabilistic approaches. That said, if we find that cognition can be well described by some fairly clean math, we should take a hard look at "normative" models that say it should be different. Up to now the descriptions have mostly had to use a pile of heuristics that could be (handwavingly) justified as "cheaper". But this work suggests a very different picture.

Greatly improved predictions across very diverse cognitive psychology experiments. For the actual papers see (http://www.thedocc.com/publications-2/ http://www.thedocc.com/publications-2/).

eli_gottlieb 11y ago

This sounds less like the mathematics behind quantum mechanics (eg: negative amplitudes) are themselves relevant, and more like quantum mechanics "bakes in" the kind of resource-bounded processing and causal structure that we expect good theories of cognition to have. Last I've heard, probabilistic modelling of cognition - with resource-bounded processing and causal modelling in place of "pure" probability theory - has been a fairly successful research program. What advantage does quantum "complex" probability have over that, or over some generalizing to a measure theory with an arbitrary norm?

jedharris 11y ago
This may answer your question: Bayesian comparison of a quantum versus a traditional model of human decision making http://www.thedocc.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/J24.-BuseWangShiffrin2015Bayesian.pdf http://www.thedocc.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/J24.-BuseW...
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  That mostly doesn't help, due to the fact that, as I understand the term, standard "decision theories" are intended as normative theories, meaning that when real behavior deviates, the investigators write the behavior off as wrong for failing to conform to theory, instead of trying to come up with a theory that actually describes the behavior. So if you end up comparing an even-loosely-descriptive theory to a normative one, the descriptive theory will win, every time, no matter how far it is from true accuracy. That is, if you line up prospect theory, standard normative decision theory, and some new descriptive theory, the latter will definitely win in a model selection. But that doesn't tell us how the quantum descriptive theory compares to, for instance, the causal-probabilistic descriptive theory.
- jedharris 11y ago
  I don't understand your point in comparing this work to normative decision theories. The work is explicitly modeling experimental results that have been hard to model with existing probabilistic approaches. That said, if we find that cognition can be well described by some fairly clean math, we should take a hard look at "normative" models that say it should be different. Up to now the descriptions have mostly had to use a pile of heuristics that could be (handwavingly) justified as "cheaper". But this work suggests a very different picture.