Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Human attention exhibits an attentional bottleneck during which conscious perception is impaired, a phenomenon that has not yet been explored directly with quantum models. This emerges when competing stimuli are presented serially and briefly. The representation of the stimuli was encoded as two-qubit entangled states, either correlated or anticorrelated. The mask intensity was encoded through random angle rotations to a qubit. The two qubits formed Bell states (Psi and Phi), undergoing deep entanglement through repeated layers. Measurement in terms of probability at each depth level simulated the attentional refraction and oscillation consistent with patterns observed in human studies, supported by extra measurements altogether, such as separate and combined probabilities, expectation values, and measures including entropy, fidelity, and concurrence. The model reproduced several effects found in attentional blink, specifically the well-known lag-1 sparing and masking effects, as well as two additional effects newly termed as partial lag-2 sparing and lag-7 divergence.