Entanglement in Cognition violating Bell Inequalities Beyond Cirelsons Bound


Abstract in English

We present the results of two tests where a sample of human participants were asked to make judgements about the conceptual combinations {it The Animal Acts} and {it The Animal eats the Food}. Both tests significantly violate the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt version of Bell inequalities (`CHSH inequality), thus exhibiting manifestly non-classical behaviour due to the meaning connection between the individual concepts that are combined. We then apply a quantum-theoretic framework which we developed for any Bell-type situation and represent empirical data in complex Hilbert space. We show that the observed violations of the CHSH inequality can be explained as a consequence of a strong form of `quantum entanglement between the component conceptual entities in which both the state and measurements are entangled. We finally observe that a quantum model in Hilbert space can be elaborated in these Bell-type situations even when the CHSH violation exceeds the known `Cirelson bound, in contrast to a widespread belief. These findings confirm and strengthen the results we recently obtained in a variety of cognitive tests and document and image retrieval operations on the same conceptual combinations.

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