Subadditivity of episodic memory states: a complementarity approach

We will comment on a paper by Brainerd, C., Wang, Z. and Reyna, V. ([1]) in which they introduce the quantum episodic memory (QEM) model which models the subadditivity in the classical disjunction rule that the human episodic memory exhibits in an experiment concerning word remembrance, also described in their paper. After listing and generalizing some issues we have with their use of quantum techniques in this approach and showing that the QEM model actually yields classical probabilities, we will propose an alternative quantum technical model, in which we see dierent memory types as incompatible measurements on an agent. Next to subadditivity, we will discuss other quantum features such as order eects of our model and propose a new experiment to observe these. We will use this example to argue that quantum models with all relevant vectors orthogonal always have classical equivalents and that non-orthogonality is the most important distinction between classical and quantum models