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J. Hahn:
"A quantum formalization for perspective changes during the communication of route instructions";
accepted as talk for: Doktoratskollege, Zürich (invited); 2014-12-10 - 2014-12-11.

The exchange of route instructions between two human agents can be modeled as a
communication setting. If such a conversation is to be successful, it requires both participants
to make contributions to discourse. One aspect is perspective taking in order to infer
potentially existing knowledge in the other person.
The process of taking another person's perspective exhibits an order effect that also occurs in
surveys (e.g., questionnaires) where the position (and thus the order) of questions can
influence the outcome. Classical statistics is not able to model order effects because it is based
on set theory and thus assumes that operators commute (e.g., A ∪ B = B ∪ A).
In this talk, I present a quantum formalization based on vector spaces to account for
perspective changes during the human verbal exchange of route instructions.