25 research outputs found
The usability of description logics: understanding the cognitive difficulties presented by description logics
Description Logics have been extensively studied from the viewpoint of decidability and computational tractability. Less attention has been given to their usability and the cognitive difficulties they present, in particular for those who are not specialists in logic. This paper reports on a study into the difficulties associated with the most commonly used Description Logic features. Psychological theories are used to take account of these. Whilst most of the features presented no difficulty to participants, the comprehension of some was affected by commonly occurring misconceptions. The paper proposes explanations and remedies for some of these difficulties. In addition, the time to confirm stated inferences was found to depend both on the maximum complexity of the relations involved and the number of steps in the argument
Quantum Structure in Cognition: Why and How Concepts are Entangled
One of us has recently elaborated a theory for modelling concepts that uses
the state context property (SCoP) formalism, i.e. a generalization of the
quantum formalism. This formalism incorporates context into the mathematical
structure used to represent a concept, and thereby models how context
influences the typicality of a single exemplar and the applicability of a
single property of a concept, which provides a solution of the 'Pet-Fish
problem' and other difficulties occurring in concept theory. Then, a quantum
model has been worked out which reproduces the membership weights of several
exemplars of concepts and their combinations. We show in this paper that a
further relevant effect appears in a natural way whenever two or more concepts
combine, namely, 'entanglement'. The presence of entanglement is explicitly
revealed by considering a specific example with two concepts, constructing some
Bell's inequalities for this example, testing them in a real experiment with
test subjects, and finally proving that Bell's inequalities are violated in
this case. We show that the intrinsic and unavoidable character of entanglement
can be explained in terms of the weights of the exemplars of the combined
concept with respect to the weights of the exemplars of the component concepts.Comment: 10 page
Classical Logical versus Quantum Conceptual Thought: Examples in Economics, Decision theory and Concept Theory
Inspired by a quantum mechanical formalism to model concepts and their
disjunctions and conjunctions, we put forward in this paper a specific
hypothesis. Namely that within human thought two superposed layers can be
distinguished: (i) a layer given form by an underlying classical deterministic
process, incorporating essentially logical thought and its indeterministic
version modeled by classical probability theory; (ii) a layer given form under
influence of the totality of the surrounding conceptual landscape, where the
different concepts figure as individual entities rather than (logical)
combinations of others, with measurable quantities such as 'typicality',
'membership', 'representativeness', 'similarity', 'applicability', 'preference'
or 'utility' carrying the influences. We call the process in this second layer
'quantum conceptual thought', which is indeterministic in essence, and contains
holistic aspects, but is equally well, although very differently, organized
than logical thought. A substantial part of the 'quantum conceptual thought
process' can be modeled by quantum mechanical probabilistic and mathematical
structures. We consider examples of three specific domains of research where
the effects of the presence of quantum conceptual thought and its deviations
from classical logical thought have been noticed and studied, i.e. economics,
decision theory, and concept theories and which provide experimental evidence
for our hypothesis.Comment: 14 page
Effect of the Task, Visual and Semantic Context on Word Target Detection
Abstract. Although being a daily task, the search for a word among others words is a new research domain we investigated in order to find the kinds contextual factors that can facilitate semantic oriented visual search. We report two experiments assessing task context, visual context and semantic context. Some of our results are found to be those of classical non-semantic visual search, while others show the impact of the semantic context. Basic recommendations can be find out for Human-Computer conception and cognitive chronometry methodology.
Experimental Evidence for Quantum Structure in Cognition
We proof a theorem that shows that a collection of experimental data of
membership weights of items with respect to a pair of concepts and its
conjunction cannot be modeled within a classical measure theoretic weight
structure in case the experimental data contain the effect called
overextension. Since the effect of overextension, analogue to the well-known
guppy effect for concept combinations, is abundant in all experiments testing
weights of items with respect to pairs of concepts and their conjunctions, our
theorem constitutes a no-go theorem for classical measure structure for common
data of membership weights of items with respect to concepts and their
combinations. We put forward a simple geometric criterion that reveals the non
classicality of the membership weight structure and use experimentally measured
membership weights estimated by subjects in experiments to illustrate our
geometrical criterion. The violation of the classical weight structure is
similar to the violation of the well-known Bell inequalities studied in quantum
mechanics, and hence suggests that the quantum formalism and hence the modeling
by quantum membership weights can accomplish what classical membership weights
cannot do.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure
The Cognitive Complexity of OWL Justifications
Abstract. In this paper, we present an approach to determining the cognitive complexity of justifications for entailments of OWL ontologies. We introduce a simple cognitive complexity model and present the results of validating that model via experiments involving OWL users. The validation is based on test data derived from a large and diverse corpus of naturally occurring justifications. Our contributions include validation for the cognitive complexity model, new insights into justification complexity, a significant corpus with novel analyses of justifications suitable for experimentation, and an experimental protocol suitable for model validation and refinement.