The rise of ubiquitous computing has cemented ubiquitous reproduction (UR) as a defining feature of contemporary human environments. UR is most obvious on our televisions and smartphones but has homogenised most material aspects of our lives. Emerging technologies such as 3D printing and robotics will ensure that this trend intensifies. UR is an issue of global scale that is relatively intractable to qualitative treatment. This paper introduces a novel quantitative approach to cognitive science and to analysis of UR. The approach uses the finiteness of cognition to establish a minimal ontology with which to model cognitive diversity under UR. It demonstrates that, despite widespread valorisation of diversity, cognitive diversity must be declining at a global level. The implications of this for creativity are that the arc for creative impact is growing shorter as the need to be immediately intelligible promotes the formulaic at the expense of the interpretable.

The purpose of this paper is to present a novel conceptualisation of an intuitive, primitive form of trust termed proto-trust. This concept is proposed in order to account for the many different senses, types and domains in which trust has traditionally been defined and theorised. A brief review of the literature on affective and intuitive trust is presented, informing the definition and formalisation of proto-trust. Following this, a preliminary empirical investigation of proto-trust is described, where intuitive trust assessments are compared to analytical trust decisions, under various attribution prompts. Results showed effects of attribution prompts on changes to trust assessments from intuitive to deliberative decisions. In addition, qualitative data are presented for the various reasons participants gave for their trust decisions. One of these reasons (emotional reaction) was found to affect the degree of difference between intuitive and deliberative trust assessments.

Two perspectives on human cognition are contrasted: the computational mind and the phenomenological mind. The com-putational mind derives from the cognitivist hypothesis and is based on representation, computation and realism. Whileuseful for cognitive modelling, it is limited as it cannot cater for a cognitive agents experience. The phenomenologicalmind foregrounds experience by drawing on the concept of the enactive mind. The phenomenological mind refers to aview of cognition that is not predicated on the pre-existing mental representation of an objective world, and so is cog-nitively anti-realist and non-representational. Quantum cognition offers the prospect for cognitive modelers to step outof the computational mind but still have tools to rigorously and formally explore the anti-realism inherent to the phe-nomenological mind. The concept of contextuality from quantum cognition is proposed as a signature of experience in thephenomenological mind.

This article addresses the effectiveness of search reformulation using query refinement mechanisms on the Internet. Cognitive load was measured using a secondary digit-monitoring task. The load was found to be lower when using the refinement mechanisms than when perusing document summaries - suggesting that the development of refinement mechanisms can make Internet searching easier. Two refinement mechanisms, one based on statistical term co-occurrence and the other on a shallow natural language parsing technique were tested. No difference in load was found, possibly because of the limited time that subjects spent in the refinement process.

This paper provides the foundations of a uni-fied cognitive decision-making framework (QulBIT)which is derived from quantum theory. The mainadvantage of this framework is that it can caterfor paradoxical and irrational human decision mak-ing. Although quantum approaches for cognitionhave demonstrated advantages over classical prob-abilistic approaches and bounded rationality mod-els, they still lack explanatory power. To addressthis, we introduce a novel explanatory analysis ofthe decision-maker’s belief space. This is achievedby exploiting quantum interference effects as a wayof both quantifying and explaining the decision-maker’s uncertainty. We detail the main modulesof the unified framework, the explanatory analy-sis method, and illustrate their application in situ-ations violating the Sure Thing Principle.

This study utilises an experiment famous in quantum physics,the Stern-Gerlach experiment, to inform the structure of an ex-perimental protocol from which a quantum cognitive decisionmodel can be developed. The ’quantumness’ of this modelis tested by computing a discrete quasi-probabilistic Wignerfunction. Based on theory from quantum physics, our hypothe-sis is that the Stern-Gerlach protocol will admit negative valuesin the Wigner function, thus signalling that the cognitive de-cision model is quantum. A crowdsourced experiment of twoimages was used to collect decisions around three questions re-lated to image trustworthiness. The resultant data was used toinstantiate the quantum model and compute the Wigner func-tion. Negative values in the Wigner functions of both imageswere encountered, thus substantiating our hypothesis. Find-ings also revealed that the quantum cognitive model was amore accurate predictor of decisions when compared to pre-dictions computed using Bayes’ rule.