Imagine you’re at a dance party and the DJ plays two different songs. One is a catchy tune that gets everyone moving, while the other is a slow jam that sets a more relaxed mood. Now, let’s say that instead of songs, we’re talking about cognitive processes: categorization and decision-making. In previous studies, scientists have focused on these processes separately, like studying the grooves of one song or the vibes of the other. But what happens when they interact? That’s what this research aimed to find out. Using a task that involved categorizing faces and then making decisions based on those categories, researchers discovered that the two processes are not always perfectly synchronized. Sometimes, participants responded to the contingencies between categories and decisions in unexpected ways. By comparing different sequences of responses, the researchers noticed something interesting: categorization seemed to interfere with decision-making. It was like having the slow jam playing while trying to keep up with the fast-paced dancers! To make sense of these findings, scientists tested two models: a quantum cognition model and an exemplar categorization model. Both models predicted interference effects, but the quantum model provided a better fit for the data overall. So, just like two songs playing at a dance party can create different moods and interactions, the dance between categorization and decision-making unfolds in unique ways in our minds. Want to learn more about this cognitive dance? Check out the full article!

Abstract
Though individual categorization or decision processes have been studied separately in many previous investigations, few studies have investigated how they interact by using a two-stage task of first categorizing and then deciding. To address this issue, we investigated a categorization-decision task in two experiments. In both, participants were shown six faces varying in width, first asked to categorize the faces, and then decide a course of action for each face. Each experiment was designed to include three groups, and for each group, we manipulated the probabilistic contingencies between stimulus, category assignments, and decision consequences. For each group, each participant received three different sequences of category response, category feedback, decision response, and decision feedback. We found that participants were only partially responsive in the appropriate directions to the contingencies assigned to each group. Comparisons of results from different sequences provided evidence for empirical interference effects of categorization on decisions. The empirical interference effect is defined as the difference between the probability of taking a hostile action in decision-alone conditions and the total probability of taking a hostile action in categorization-decision conditions. To test competing accounts for multiple empirical results, including two-stage choice probabilities and empirical interference effects, we compared a quantum cognition model versus a two-stage exemplar categorization model at both aggregate and individual levels. Using a Bayesian information criterion, we found that the quantum model provided an overall better model fit than the exemplar model. Although both models predicted empirical interference effects, the exemplar model was able to generate probabilistic deviation by incorporating category information of the first stage into the feature representation of the subsequent decision stage, while the quantum model produced interference effect by superposition, measurement, and quantum entanglement.

Read Full Article (External Site)