Events / IMB Seminar: Jerome Busemeyer

IMB Seminar: Jerome Busemeyer

Jerome Busemeyer
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
Indiana University – Bloomington

 

What Is Quantum Cognition, and How Is It Applied to Psychology?

 

Quantum cognition is a new research program that uses principles from quantum theory as a framework to explain human cognition, including judgment and decision making, and conceptual reasoning. This research is not concerned with whether the brain is a quantum computer. Instead, it uses quantum theory as a fresh conceptual framework and a coherent set of formal tools for explaining puzzling empirical findings in psychology. In this introduction, I will focus on two quantum principles as examples to show why quantum cognition is an appealing new theoretical direction for psychology: complementarity, which suggests that some psychological measures have to be made sequentially and that the context generated by the first measure can influence responses to the next one, producing measurement order effects, and superposition, which suggests that some psychological states cannot be defined with respect to definite values but, instead, that all possible values within the superposition have some potential for being expressed. I will present evidence showing how these two principles work together to provide a coherent explanation for many divergent and puzzling phenomena in psychology.

 

The seminar will begin at 12:00pm. A pizza lunch will be served at 11:45am.