# The Heart of an Image: Quantum Superposition and Entanglement in Visual Perception

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.02216 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02216/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 31 Jan 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [A Planck Radiation and Quantization Scheme for Human Cognition and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03306/) (2022)
- [Are Words the Quanta of Human Language? Extending the Domain of Quantum Cognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04913/) (2021)
- [Human Perception as a Phenomenon of Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03726/) (2022)
- [Quantum Bose-Einstein Statistics for Indistinguishable Concepts in Human Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15125/) (2021)
- [Entanglement as a Method to Reduce Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05898/) (2023)
- [Are Colors Quanta of Light for Human Vision? A Quantum Cognition Study of Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18850/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We analyse the way in which the principle that 'the whole is greater than the sum of its parts' manifests itself with phenomena of visual perception. For this investigation we use insights and techniques coming from quantum cognition, and more specifically we are inspired by the correspondence of this principle with the phenomenon of the conjunction effect in human cognition. We identify entities of meaning within artefacts of visual perception and rely on how such entities are modelled for corpuses of texts such as the webpages of the World-Wide Web for our study of how they appear in phenomena of visual perception. We identify concretely the conjunction effect in visual artefacts and analyse its structure in the example of a photograph. We also analyse quantum entanglement between different aspects of meaning in artefacts of visual perception. We confirm its presence by showing that well elected experiments on images retrieved accordingly by Google Images give rise to probabilities and expectation values violating the Clauser Horne Shimony Holt version of Bell's inequalities. We point out how this approach can lead to a mathematical description of the meaning content of a visual artefact such as a photograph.