Toward a Quantum Theory of Cognition: History, Development and Perspectives

Information processing at a conceptual level is considered to be one of the hardest challenges in Cognitive Science. In particular, a number of studies in behavioral research have shown that humans process concepts in a way that is incompatible with traditional frameworks such as classical probability and fuzzy set theory. Recently, this incompatibility has been shown to occur at a deep structural level, and mathematical schemes founded on quantum structures have been proposed as alternative modeling frameworks. The quantum approach 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 the limitations of traditional frameworks to handle some important cognitive tasks, introduce the fundamentals of this quantum cognitive approach, and present some remarkable applications.