Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Cognition — the mind as information processing — perception, memory, reasoning and cognitive strategies — as studied by cognitive science and philosophy of mind (group: philosophy).
29 of 371 QUESTION documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| QUESTION-042 | In a recorded brain, where anatomy fixes the candidate units independently, do the blocks that clear an Occam-priced test fall at the anatomical boundaries, at which scale, and how long do short-range and long-range blocks last? | Filed in the fourth synthesis pass to give readings no question asked for a place in the argument. It bears on CLAIM-157, CLAIM-154 and CLAIM-164. THEORY-124, THEORY-097 and THEORY-088 answer it in part; the body gives each one’s limit. | Open |
| QUESTION-044 v2 | When an organization is said to be angry or afraid, is the emotion fixed by a mode of action readiness the organization has, or by the attributor’s emotion concept grouping variable states? | Filed in the fourth synthesis pass to give readings no question asked for a place in the argument. It bears on CLAIM-039 and QUESTION-053. THEORY-057 and THEORY-055 answer it in part; the body gives each one’s limit. Deferred with its line on filing; Open since the owner reopened the line on 2026-10-23. | Open |
| QUESTION-050 | Does a communicative act’s identity split into a factor internal to the interpreter and a relational factor fixed by world and community, and which of the two must a translation preserve? | Filed in the fourth synthesis pass to give readings no question asked for a place in the argument. It bears on CLAIM-151, CLAIM-115, CLAIM-118, CLAIM-046 and QUESTION-029. THEORY-089 answers it in part; the body gives each one’s limit. | Open |
| QUESTION-061 v3 | In a brain, is conscious access one exclusive broadcast that reaches every specialised processor at once, or can a content be accessed by some consumers and not others? | Filed in the fourth synthesis pass to give readings no question asked for a place in the argument. It bears on CLAIM-003. THEORY-096, the global workspace account, offers the uniform answer. THEORY-098, THEORY-102, THEORY-103 and THEORY-245 bear on it without settling a part, and the body gives each one’s limit. Deferred with its line. | Deferred |
| QUESTION-062 | Within a single decision, does a goal govern which response becomes effective by setting the terms of the competition among responses (threshold, starting point, inhibition) rather than by selecting one? | Filed in the fourth synthesis pass to give readings no question asked for a place in the argument. It bears on CLAIM-027, CLAIM-122 and QUESTION-054. THEORY-061, THEORY-068 and THEORY-059 answer it in part; the body gives each one’s limit. | Open |
| QUESTION-095 | Is leaving the result of a computation where it can be cheaply retrieved the same trade as amortizing the computation, and does one account of when it pays cover a crew’s speed bugs, a record’s filed arguments and a reasoner’s reused inferences? | The owner, after reading Hutchins’s cockpit paper: “amortized retrieval is actually a kind of amortized computation”. The speed bugs are computed once at low load and read back as a judgement of spatial adjacency. CLAIM-303 said filing moves work across time; TERM-055’s note said retrieval can be done before the request. This asks whether those are one trade, and which literature has formalized it. | Open |
| QUESTION-096 | When does a communicative cue change what an interpreter can recover from an unchanged internal state, and how can such an addressing effect be told apart from new information, added computation or a changed policy? | A19’s question, after the owner tied the represented / recoverable / actionable distinction to QKV attention and Kanerva’s sparse distributed memory at U19. The record already holds that attention approximates SDM (LIT-269). | Open |
| QUESTION-097 | When does a distinction an organized agent can observe correspond to an intervention it can perform, and when do the two come apart? | A18’s eighth candidate. The exchange had been saying “observable” where the issue was sometimes action. Observational and action-relative equivalence need not coincide. | Open |
| QUESTION-101 | When does whether a resource is available for an action depend on the organization of an agent–environment system rather than on what any one member knows or can do? | A17 §9, from the owner’s EMT case (CASE-085). The team knew the drug was stocked, the box encoded where, and neither got it to the medic in time. Hutchins’s distributed cognition (LIT-1060, unread) is the tradition that asks this. | Open |
| QUESTION-103 | Is computational indistinguishability the bounded-observer form of signal detection’s chance ROC, and is ideal-observer efficiency its empirical measure, so that the record’s formal results on bounded observers can be tested on real ones? | The owner asked whether material downstream of computational indistinguishability, or the signal detection literature, would help. A test’s distinguishing advantage is its hit rate minus its false-alarm rate, a point on its ROC; the best over all tests is total variation, reached by the likelihood-ratio detector (THEORY-031). Computational indistinguishability says every efficient observer’s ROC stays near the chance diagonal. Ideal-observer analysis measures how far real observers fall short of the ideal. This asks whether the two are one framework. | Open |
| QUESTION-109 | When does cue-dependent retrieval make bounded reasoning better, and when does it produce anchoring, path dependence or entrenchment? | A20’s question, after the owner tied addressing to anchoring bias at U20. The same selectivity that makes retrieval cheap can make the evidence a judgement sees depend on where it started. | Open |
| QUESTION-113 | When a system names a category, which criterion is it meeting: that the data supports the distinction, that a deadline forces it, or that it survives refinement and compression, and do the three ever pick the same categories? | The record now holds three criteria for when a distinction earns a name. CLAIM-154 says when the data supports it, and CLAIM-307 when a deadline forces it, the two moving opposite ways with copy count. The third is from Part III of the owner’s LEGO monograph: a category is worth keeping when it persists as refinement adds distinctions and compression prunes them. MOM-CLM-138 rejected the metaphysics built on it and kept the observation as measurable, and CLAIM-164 says what a persistent spectral mode picks out. This asks how the three relate. | Open |
| QUESTION-114 | Is sorting a collection amortized search, and does physical database design, where a table is stored in one order and every further index is paid for in space and upkeep, give the joint cost model that the question on amortized retrieval lacks? | The LEGO parable (CASE-094) is QUESTION-095’s trade in its plainest form. Sorting spends search once, against retrievals later, and leaves the result in the world, as the cockpit’s speed bugs do. CLAIM-310 adds that one set of bins realizes one partition, chosen against a query mix. A database table is stored in one physical order, and every further index costs space and work on every insert. Choosing indexes for a workload is a studied problem with explicit cost models. This asks whether that model is the one QUESTION-095 is looking for. | Open |
| QUESTION-121 v2 | Within a single mind, what plays the part of the operator model’s independent scoring: what evidence reaches a judgement–observation loop, or what scores it, without passing through the interpretation it tests, and does any of it survive the loss of all action? | Left open by CLAIM-342, which says what anchors a judgement–observation loop is evidence whose arrival or scoring does not pass through the interpretation it tests, as Regime B’s independent scoring does in CLAIM-330. In a population of operators that scoring can be supplied from outside. In one mind it has to come from somewhere, and if it needs action, CLAIM-339 wins. Filed with five candidates from the record. It separates two things the locked-in case runs together: evidence the loop did not select, which a paralysed person still receives, and contingency between intention and outcome, which they lose. | Open |
| QUESTION-137 | Do human transmission chains converge to the learners’ independently measured prior where their responses behave as posterior samples, and depart from it as the MAP analysis predicts where they behave as maximizers? | The empirical half of what THEORY-155’s promotion condition asked for until 2026-10-19. The theorem, that an ergodic chain of posterior- sampling Bayesian learners with a shared prior and matched production converges to that prior, is proved and Active. Whether human chains behave so is a separate question, and only a chain whose learners’ prior is measured or set apart from the chain can answer it. | Open |
| QUESTION-156 | Which published models of concept combination reproduce overextension by dropping conjunction-as-meet, and which by dropping an order-preserving membership weight? | What remains of THEORY-255’s former promote_when after its promotion. In any lattice with an order-preserving membership weight, conjunction as meet cannot overextend. So every model that reproduces Hampton’s guppy-type items drops one of the two. Aerts drops the meet with an emergent subspace. Which assumption the other models drop, Busemeyer and Bruza’s (LIT-316, unavailable) and Franco’s among them, has not been read. | Open |
| QUESTION-167 | Do word learners reason about an informative speaker, or only apply the size principle, when displays are built so that the two predict different bets? | Filed when the promotion audit (batch 025, ADR-047 v3) narrowed and promoted THEORY-472 to its derivation and to what Frank, Goodman, Lai and Tenenbaum measured. In their displays the informative-speaker learner and a plain size-principle learner coincide by construction, so the bets (r = .93) fit both. THEORY-472’s former promote_when, which asks for a discriminating experiment, moves here unchanged. It bears on THEORY-172, the listener-side account that extends THEORY-472. | Open |
| QUESTION-209 | Do listeners in reference and signalling games invert an informative speaker when alternatives and costs are manipulated with the uttered form held fixed, the model’s parameters are set in advance, and its predictions are tested on trial-level data against a literal listener and a likelihood-only model? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-172. THEORY-172 was promoted on 2026-10-20 (ADR-047 v3) on what was measured: in Frank and Goodman’s reference games listeners’ mean bets matched a parameter-free inverted informative speaker with a measured salience prior, and in Bergen, Goodman and Levy’s signalling games listeners read a novel signal by its alternative. The evidence is a fit of condition means with no rival model fitted. | Open |
| QUESTION-210 | Does the QQ equality of survey question-order data hold in question pairs chosen in advance by investigators other than its proposers, and does a classical model with memory, constrained to satisfy it, fit the per-pair tables as well as the projection model? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-166. THEORY-166 was promoted on 2026-10-20 (ADR-047 v3) on what Wang, Solloway, Shiffrin and Busemeyer measured: across the 66 Pew surveys of 2001-2011 that varied the order of two back-to-back questions, order changed the answers but not the probability of agreeing answers. The pairs were chosen by the equality’s proposers’ team from one organisation’s archive, and no constrained classical rival was fitted. | Open |
| QUESTION-235 | When looking and holding are priced independently and timed per person, do people still prefer re-fetching information that stays in view where it costs more total time? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-334, moved unchanged when that account was narrowed to what Ballard et al. (1997) observed in block copying and promoted on 2026-10-20 (ADR-047 v3). Open: whether holding information carries a cost beyond time, as Ballard et al. infer, or people’s choices follow total time, as Gray et al.’s model (THEORY-346) does. | Open |
| QUESTION-239 | In the linearized operator model, is scoring operators against predictions committed before the evidence equivalent to Regime B’s independent scoring? | The formal sub-question QUESTION-121 asked of its third candidate, commitment before evidence. Split off under ADR-049 and answered No by CLAIM-340. The coupling of interpretation to endorsement is γ = 4ηs(κ′ − κ̄), so commitment removes capture only when the interpretation bends the reading of the evidence no more than it bends the predictions. Which source in one mind does the scoring stays with QUESTION-121. | Answered |
| QUESTION-257 v2 | When an organizational perspective stops being enacted, what distinguishes a temporary loss of activation, a loss of the conditions for enacting it, an interruption of its social reproduction, and irreversible loss or later reconstruction, and what survives when a practice survives but the arrangements that authorized, interpreted and reproduced it do not? | From the branch of the exchange of 2026-10-22: A37’s elevated question and A39’s wording for the record, from the owner’s U37 on the doorway effect and the Cultural Revolution. CLAIM-421 separates kinds of interruption. This asks how to tell them apart in a case, and what returns after one. | Open |
| QUESTION-308 | Do the process effects of implementation intentions, the immediacy, efficiency under load and running without conscious intent of the planned response and the better detection of its cue, survive correction for publication bias or preregistered replication, and do they mediate goal attainment rather than merely accompany it? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-913, moved here when the tenth status review narrowed THEORY-913 to what the 2006 meta-analysis’s small, uncorrected pools showed, and promoted it, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Whether the effects are as large as reported, and whether they carry the effect on goal attainment, is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-309 | Within one design, do contingent if-then plans outperform schedule plans for the same goal, sample and outcome, does recording the plan weaken it, and does rehearsal work through the accessibility of the cue or the strength of the cue–response link? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-908, moved here when the tenth status review narrowed THEORY-908 to the between-test differences the 2024 meta-analysis measured, and promoted it, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Whether format, rehearsal and recording cause those differences is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-323 | After an anchoring comparison, is anchor-consistent knowledge more accessible on a measure first shown sensitive to direct priming, and does the difference go with the size of the estimate shift? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-335, moved here when the twelfth status review promoted it on a title that claims only the moderations and the failed test, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Whether the accessibility step is real is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-328 | Does an implemented model-based or latent-cause model of human avoidance, compared on the same data with the model-free two-factor implementations, reproduce the phenomena Mancinelli and Bach rate A or B, including residual avoidance after signalled outcome omission, and does a model without an inferential component fail them? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-900, moved here when the thirteenth status review promoted THEORY-900, whose title claims only the systematic review’s verdict, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Whether a fitted inferential model wins is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-351 | Recorded with single units or dense bilateral prefrontal sampling in a no-report or task-irrelevant design, is a clearly seen image’s category present in prefrontal cortex while its identity and orientation, decodable posteriorly in the same subjects, are absent there with Bayesian support for the absence, and does prefrontal cortex stay silent at stimulus offset under an equally sensitive test? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-245, moved here when the status review of 2026-10-30 narrowed and promoted it under ADR-065. COGITATE (LIT-973, read in NOTE-812) recorded high gamma, MEG and BOLD, with no single units; whether the pattern holds in signals it did not sample is open. | Open |
| QUESTION-360 | When does a learned distinction become a concept rather than a discriminator or a habit (by being reused systematically, transferring to counterfactual cases, integrating with other capacities, or being correctable), is the transition graded or categorical, and how is a concept told apart from the organization that realizes it and from the thing it is about? | From the owner’s questions at U4 to U6 of the exchange “Analyze nucleation concepts” (2026-10-31): “how does our current position characterize the notion of a ‘concept’?”, “can we distinguish between a ‘concept’ and a ‘thing’?” and “how about ‘entity’?”. The assistant defined “concept” three times in three turns, each a little differently, which is the record’s signal to give it a code. A candidate term is filed beside it, Proposed (TERM-098); this question asks what would settle it. | Open |
| QUESTION-362 | Which predictive and causal query capabilities are implied by competence across specified goal families, which are available to the agent under its actual resource constraints, and which require distinct internal modeling mechanisms; and under what conditions can those mechanisms and capabilities be maintained, revised or reconstructed endogenously? | The owner’s question at the second review of the filing of the exchange “Analyze nucleation concepts” (2026-10-31). The record’s world-model thesis (CLAIM-519) and its counter from Richens et al. (CLAIM-513) disagree less than they seem, because “world model” names several things. This question separates them so that the record can investigate each without presupposing that one is fundamental. | Open |