Hamiltonian-QEM 67
3 The Hamiltonian Based QEM Model
In essence the Hamiltonian based QEM model describes in two subsequent temporal stages how the belief state of the participants evolves through the experimental paradigm. This change of the belief state is described by two distinct Schr¨odinger evolutions. In the first stage the participant is presented with a cue originating from one of the four lists - three of them with targets, one with distractors. First, the participant processes this incoming information to change her initial ‘uniform’ belief state into a state informed by the presented cue and her memory. Subsequently this state of belief is then further evolved due to the processing of the information of the probe. The information of the probe allows for a response bias or description-dependence. We expect the latter evolution to be an attenuation of the first stage recognition phase.
State Vectors. In line with Brainerd, Wang and Reyna’s development of QEM, the state vector is expressed on the orthogonal basis (V1, V2, V3, G, N ). The model thus provides a dedicated dimension for verbatim support for each list, and a dimension for gist support shared for all lists. The last dimension is dedicated to support for non-related items or distractors. In our dynamical development of QEM each state vector is modulated according the cue and probe combination to which the subject is exposed
Ψprobe|cue(t) = [ψp|cV1 (t), ψp|cV2 (t), ψp|cV3 (t), ψp|cG(t), ψp|cN (t)]τ ,
amounting to sixteen distinct states in the present experimental paradigm.
The Initial State Vector. In the basis (V1, V2, V3, G, N ), the generalized initial state vector is expressed as
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Ψ0(g) = (1 − g )/6, |
(1 − g )/6, |
(1 − g )/6, g/ |
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, 1/ |
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(4) |
where we restrict the parameter g [−1, 1]. This initial belief state of the subject reflects to certain extent the fact - of which the subject is informed - that in this experiment half of the cues are non-studied, and half of them come from the three studied lists (p. 419, [7]). This form also implements the idea that the subject at the start has a latent tendency for acceptance of the cues. This form of the initial state expresses that a cue from a studied list elicits on average (1 − g2)/6 acceptance probability from verbatim trace and g2/2 acceptance probability from the gist trace.2 The parameter g therefor indicates the preponderance of gist in
2Without taking into account of dynamics for the e ect of cue or probe, but still applying the measurement projections Eq. (6), the amount of gist g in the initial state shows a latent tendency for overdistribution
p0(L1) + p0(L2) + p0(L3) + p0(N ) = 1 + g2
with p0(N ) = 1/2. Clearly the experimental description ‘half of the cues are N , the other half originate from the lists’, cannot be implemented exactely due to overdistribution.