How images combine meaning: quantum entanglement in visual perception

Abstract

Various empirical tests performed on human participants and also by means of search engines on the Web reveal that, whenever the conceptual combination The Animal Acts is considered as a combination of the individual concepts Animal and Acts, the 'Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt' version of Bell's inequalities ('CHSH inequality') is violated. We work out in this paper a quantum representation in Hilbert space for a dataset collected on the same combination of concepts using 'Google Images' as search engine, which 'significantly violated' the CHSH inequality. This result proves the existence of non-classical structures in visual perception and strongly indicates the presence of 'quantum entanglement' as an explanation for the meaning connection between the component concepts, also when this meaning connection is expressed through images.

Quantum semantics of text perception

“…Quantum entanglement between cognitive subspaces , , , in ( 4 ) models semantic connection between concepts A and B as subjectively established by an individual recognizing the text. So defined semantic connection is ubiquitous in human cognition, where holistic entities are described not by individual signs but by compositions thereof 31 , 80 ; description of this phenomenon in terms of quantum entanglement shows significant explanatory power 104 – 108 .…”

Special issue: quantum structures and quantum information theory

“…In the paper "How images combine meaning: quantum entanglement in visual perception," by Arguëlles and Sozzo (2020), a quantum-like probabilistic framework is used to study violations of the CHSH inequality in a cognitive scenario. A Hilbert space representation for a dataset collected using "Google Images" as search engine was used to obtain a significant violation of the CHSH inequality.…”

Beyond two modes of thought: A quantum model of how three cognitive variables yield conceptual change

“…The last two decades have generated an abundance of research on the application to human cognition of formalisms first used to model situations of ambiguity and contextuality in quantum mechanics (Khrennikov, 2010 ; Busemeyer and Bruza, 2012 ; Wang et al, 2013 ; Asano et al, 2015 ). Many different psychological phenomena have been studied, including the combination of words and concepts (Gabora and Aerts, 2002 ; Aerts and Gabora, 2005a , b ; Aerts, 2009 ; Bruza et al, 2009 , 2015 ), similarity and memory (Nelson et al, 2013 ; Pothos et al, 2013 ), information retrieval (Van Rijsbergen, 2004 ; Melucci, 2008 ), decision making and probability judgement errors (Aerts and Aerts, 1994 ; Busemeyer et al, 2006 , 2011 ; Mogiliansky et al, 2009 ; Yukalov and Sornette, 2009 ; Moreira et al, 2020 ; Sozzo, 2021 ), financial asset trading (Khrennikova and Haven, 2021 ), vision (Atmanspacher et al, 2004 ; Atmanspacher and Filk, 2013 ; Arguëlles and Sozzo, 2020 ), sensation–perception (Khrennikov, 2015 ), language and text perception (Aerts and Beltran, 2020 ; Surov et al, 2021 ), social science (Haven and Khrennikov, 2013 ; Kitto and Boschetti, 2013 ), cultural evolution (Gabora, 2001 ; Gabora and Aerts, 2009 ), creativity (Gabora and Kitto, 2013b ; Gabora and Carbert, 2015 ; Gabora, 2017 ), tonal attraction (Beim Graben and Blutner, 2019 ), and even humor (Gabora and Kitto, 2017 ). There have also been advances of a more fundamental nature into the quantum-type structure of human cognition, and findings that cognitive processes exhibit signature features of quantum structure such as superposition, entanglement, and interference (Aerts, 2009 ; Busemeyer and Bruza, 2012 ; Aerts et al, 2016 ; Surov et al, 2019 ; Ishwarya and Cherukuri, 2020 ).…”