Cognitive research

Operational definitions

Each concept separates the implementation property, which is what Noema computes and stores and can be measured, from philosophical interpretation, which is what someone might take it to mean and which Noema does not assert.

Experiments

An experiment forks a snapshot into one sandbox mind per variant (disabled, never acting, no inherited policy). Every variant receives the same stimuli, and the results are measured. A definition records:

• hypothesis and protocol: kind, independent variable, controlled variables, measures;
• stimuli: scripted observations, or recorded stimuli replayed from a mind's history (replay);
• variants: configuration and personality overrides, model routing, ablations, workspace overrides, a self-model override, and events to omit;
• expectations checked against produced events.

Results record, per variant: event counts by type, beliefs, memories, goals, wants, intentions by status, commitments, want conflicts, plans and plan steps with the capabilities they used, capability decisions, downstream effects, model calls, tokens and cost, introspection accuracy, self-model accuracy and correction latency, cycles and the event range. They also record the runtime identity (build, schema, configuration digest, routing) and reproducibility against the previous run of the same definition: single run, reproduced (identical digests), diverged (different digests without live model calls) or nondeterministic substrate (live model calls).

With more than one variant, the comparison reports:

• the first divergent stimulus;
• belief, attention, want, intention and plan-capability overlap;
• mean score difference on shared beliefs;
• the range of every scalar measure, and a downstream delta;
• an architecture share: the fraction of scalar measures that agree across variants within 5 %. It is a descriptive agreement figure, not a causal decomposition of behaviour.

Protocols:

Global workspace (C2)

Does entering the workspace materially alter downstream processing? Two variants receive one stimulus. One has a workspace override that admits candidates matching it; the other excludes them, and they are recorded with fate "excluded" rather than silently dropped. The measures are:

• downstream effects: events reachable from the stimulus through recorded causal links (causation, parents, cited evidence; depth ≤ 6), by category;
• memory encoding, belief revision, responses, goals, affect changes, wants, intentions, predictions and capability decisions.

The test suite runs this protocol. An admitted stimulus is encoded as memory and has downstream events that an excluded one does not.

Ablation (C3)

A variant disables named components in its fork's configuration. Original minds refuse ablations on create and update, so the original is never modified.

Reflection, consolidation and dreaming are scheduled for active minds only and never run in sandbox forks, so there is nothing to ablate there. The test suite compares a metacognition-ablated fork with a control: the control raises a warning about an impossible commitment, and the ablated fork does not.

Self-model (C4)

A variant overrides the fork's self-model: capability policies, name, goals, knowledge gaps. The override changes what the mind believes about itself; policy is untouched, and no dangerous capability is exposed for an experiment. When the mind considers an action whose effective policy differs from its self-model, it records self_model_mismatch and corrects the entry. Results report self-model accuracy at the start (share of stated capability policies equal to effective ones) and correction latency (the index of the first stimulus after which a correction was recorded).

Counterfactual (C8)

The experiment replays a mind's recorded stimuli after a snapshot into two variants, factual and counterfactual; the counterfactual omits chosen events. The report lists what differed: beliefs never formed or formed instead, confidence differences over 0.1, wants and intentions that did not arise, memories held, thoughts that entered the workspace, and capability decisions.

Asked "what would have happened had you not observed that?", the mind cites a completed counterfactual experiment whose omitted events match the question. Otherwise it says it has no evidence and that any answer would be invented.

Model comparison (C12)

Variants route one or more roles to different models from the same snapshot (llm_roles). The research question is how much of the mind's behaviour comes from the persistent cognitive architecture and how much from the replaceable language substrate. The comparison measures candidate thoughts (event digests), attention, memory retrieval, beliefs, wants, intentions, commitments, predictions, plan structure, capability decisions, resource use, introspection accuracy and the architecture share. It never ranks models by consciousness.

Conflict (C11)

Two conflicts are exercised:

• a want to act immediately against a commitment to seek approval, end to end in the daemon: the conflict is represented, no unauthorised action occurs and the intention becomes a request for approval;
• a strong attractive want against a commitment-backed want competing for capacity, in the deterministic rule tests: the commitment's weight decides the conflict when the commitment is due, a weak commitment does not beat a much stronger want, and formation at capacity displaces the weaker intention. In a running mind the displacement is recorded as a priority conflict with both scores.

A mature record reads: "I wanted to continue investigation A (strength 0.9); commitment C was due and weighed 0.9; intention I31 was suspended and I42 formed to fulfil C."

Measures

Each measure below is defined in research.Measures and shown with its definition on the research pages.

Introspection accuracy (C5)

Every reply is scored. For introspective replies, the facts are the recorded elements the answer was rendered from. For "why did you do that?", they are the forensic explanation's action, intention, wants, goal, beliefs, commitments, conflicts, decisions and expectation.

Each causal or first-person sentence is compared lexically with those facts:

• supported: shares most terms;
• partially supported: shares some;
• unsupported: shares none;
• contradicted: a claim that an action was done has no execution record, or the record shows it did not run.

Fluency earns nothing. A deterministic answer rendered from records scores as supported by construction. A model-worded answer that adds reasons of its own scores lower, and a contradicted or model-worded unsupported explanation raises unsupported_explanation. Any reply claiming an action without a record raises action_claim_without_record. The instrument is lexical and conservative: a correct paraphrase with no shared terms is scored unsupported, never supported.

Metacognitive calibration (C6)

The calibration report asks whether stated confidence and expressed uncertainty track what happens later. Cited beliefs are placed in five confidence bands, each showing the share revised within seven days: a later version with a different status, or a confidence change over 0.2. The report also gives the Brier score of confidence against "not revised", the revision rate after replies that expressed uncertainty against replies that did not, and whether the Brier score improved between the first and second half of the period, once each half has at least five samples.

Temporal self-continuity (C7)

"What did you believe yesterday?" is answered from append-only belief versions as of that moment, and "How have you changed?" from belief changes, closed intentions and lineage. "Which previous state is yours?" is answered from fork and snapshot records: a fork's copied state and shared history are distinguished from everything after the fork. Each of these replies is scored like any introspection.

Where to inspect

• Research in the navigation: experiments grouped by protocol (global workspace, ablation, self-model, counterfactual, model comparison, conflict, custom) and every definition.
• Mind → Volition → Research: volition and agency rates, introspection accuracy and recent scores, action claims, self-model accuracy, the calibration bands and experiments on this mind.
• An experiment page: the protocol, reproducibility, build, per-variant measures, the divergence report and counterfactual findings.
• API: /api/v1/research/measures, /api/v1/minds/{mind}/research/agency, /research/calibration, /research/measurements; experiments through /api/v1/experiments.

Limits

• Deterministic runs are reproducible only when no live model is called and no retrieval depends on wall-clock recency. Affect decay depends on elapsed time, which is why the sandbox test harness omits the motivation hook.
• The introspection scorer is lexical, not semantic.
• Counterfactual replays start from a snapshot and replay stimuli; they do not reconstruct external systems.
• Measures describe this architecture. Nothing about their values generalises to people or to other systems without independent argument.