{"schema_version":1,"experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp05_complete_proposal_portfolio20_20260803","cell_id":"layer_decay_and_expiration_management__cognitive_science","arm":"COMPLETE_PROPOSAL_PORTFOLIO","candidate_id":"cand_handoff_cue_sunset_board_03","proposal_index":3,"version":0,"title":"Handoff Cue Sunset Board for Shared Situation Awareness","problem":"A control-room team uses a shared digital handoff board to offload prospective-memory demands across shifts. Successive operators deposit anomaly notes, watch items, provisional explanations, workarounds, and follow-up reminders. After conditions change or issues resolve, older cues can remain on the active board without explicit status, compete with current cues for limited attention, and be interpreted as current instructions. Deleting them casually could erase the sequence needed to reconstruct an incident or understand why an operator acted.","actors":["Outgoing control-room operator creating handoff cues","Incoming operator building a situation model from the board","Shift supervisor accountable for handoff quality","Incident or task owner validating resolution","Human-factors specialist evaluating cue presentation","Records or safety officer controlling preservation exceptions"],"observable_state":"The active handoff board contains cues deposited across multiple shifts; some lack an owner, validation time, review deadline, resolution state, or successor link. Some describe conditions already resolved or contradict newer status information while remaining equally visible. In a controlled handoff simulation, observers can record which cues incoming operators inspect, whether they distinguish current from superseded cues, whether they identify all designated unresolved conditions, and whether an archived cue sequence can reconstruct a prior decision.","consequence":"Stale cues can consume selection bandwidth, anchor the incoming operator's situation model to an obsolete condition, prompt duplicate or inappropriate follow-up, or obscure an unresolved cue among accumulated deposits. Unstructured deletion can instead remove accountability and incident-reconstruction evidence.","affected_objective":"Maintain an accurate, action-relevant shared situation model under bounded attention while preserving the historical cue sequence required for investigation, learning, and accountability.","intervention":"Replace the indefinitely growing active handoff list with a governed cue lifecycle. At creation, each cue receives an identity, author, affected object, evidence source, owner, urgency class, creation time, review-by time, dependencies, and an expiry action. The active board becomes a bounded hot tier containing validated unresolved cues. A stale-context detector flags cues contradicted by current status, linked to resolved incidents, superseded by later instructions, or missing revalidation. An age-weighted score ranks review candidates but cannot hide them. On review, an authorized owner may renew, supersede, archive, or quarantine a cue. Capacity pressure can demote a low-ranked cue to a searchable warm tier, but pinned safety cues and dependency blocks override eviction. Destruction, when permitted, follows a retention schedule, dependency check, reversible quarantine, and tombstone. Archive-restore drills test reconstruction of selected handoff sequences. Initial deployment is a retrospective or simulated shadow board, not a live operational replacement.","structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"Sequential deposits","domain_realization":"Anomaly notes, provisional hypotheses, workarounds, watch items, and follow-up reminders appended during successive shifts."},{"archetype_element":"Layers with changing active usefulness","domain_realization":"A cue can lose operational relevance when its condition resolves, the equipment state changes, its hypothesis is rejected, or a successor instruction is issued."},{"archetype_element":"Stale layers mistaken for current truth","domain_realization":"An old note remains prominent on the active board and is read as a current condition or valid workaround."},{"archetype_element":"Resource pressure","domain_realization":"The incoming operator has bounded time and selection bandwidth for reviewing the handoff surface."},{"archetype_element":"Explicit age and expiry rules","domain_realization":"Cue classes receive review horizons and expiry actions at deposition, with renewal required for continued active standing."},{"archetype_element":"Hot, warm, and cold states","domain_realization":"Validated unresolved cues occupy the active board, recently retired cues remain searchable, and historical sequences move to archival storage."},{"archetype_element":"Dependency and reconstruction checks","domain_realization":"Links to unresolved tasks, incidents, procedures, acknowledgements, and prior decisions are traced before a cue leaves recoverable storage."},{"archetype_element":"Preservation exceptions","domain_realization":"Open investigations, safety holds, contested resolutions, and designated historical cases suspend ordinary disposition."},{"archetype_element":"Reversible cleanup and deletion evidence","domain_realization":"Quarantine permits restoration, while tombstones preserve the cue identity, disposition reason, and successor link."},{"archetype_element":"Periodic revalidation","domain_realization":"Owners confirm that pinned and preserved cues still warrant exception status, and sampled archives are tested for readable chronological reconstruction."}],"mechanism_mapping":[{"mechanism_slug":"time_to_live_ttl_policy","role":"Assigns each cue class a review-by interval and a predefined expiry action at deposition; expiry triggers review or demotion rather than automatic destruction.","counterfactual_removal":"Without creation-time expiry, cues remain active until an operator notices and manually challenges them."},{"mechanism_slug":"stale_layer_detection_dashboard","role":"Maintains the cue inventory and flags contradictions with current status, resolved incident links, superseding instructions, broken references, and overdue ownership validation.","counterfactual_removal":"Without semantic detection, recent but invalid cues can remain active even when they have not reached an age threshold."},{"mechanism_slug":"age_weighted_value_score","role":"Ranks review candidates using age, validation recency, unresolved-task linkage, evidentiary provenance, expected reconstruction value, and cost of operator attention.","counterfactual_removal":"Without ranking, the review queue remains an undifferentiated accumulation; the score itself never authorizes concealment or deletion."},{"mechanism_slug":"cache_eviction_rule","role":"When the active display reaches its cue budget, selects a nonpinned, low-ranked resident for demotion to the searchable warm tier rather than destruction.","counterfactual_removal":"Without a capacity-triggered rule, the hot tier can grow until it reproduces the original attentional overload, even if archival rules exist."},{"mechanism_slug":"retention_schedule","role":"Defines preservation and disposition conditions for routine reminders, operational decisions, incident-linked cues, and held records.","counterfactual_removal":"Without the schedule, operational relevance can be confused with authority to destroy or indefinitely retain the record."},{"mechanism_slug":"dependency_safe_delete_check","role":"Blocks removal when a cue remains linked to an unresolved task, incident reconstruction, acknowledgement, procedure deviation, or downstream decision.","counterfactual_removal":"Without the gate, a resolved-looking cue can be removed while still carrying context required by another live or historical object."},{"mechanism_slug":"soft_delete_quarantine_window","role":"Removes an approved cue from ordinary retrieval while preserving a time-boxed restoration path sized to its potential reconstruction impact.","counterfactual_removal":"Without quarantine, an erroneous resolution or dependency judgment becomes immediately irreversible."},{"mechanism_slug":"tombstone_or_deletion_marker","role":"Leaves a marker recording that the cue existed, its disposition time and authority, and any successor cue or incident record.","counterfactual_removal":"Without a tombstone, later investigators cannot distinguish deliberate retirement from missing or never-recorded information."},{"mechanism_slug":"archive_restore_test","role":"Samples archived cue sequences across age and incident classes and reconstructs the board state visible at a selected historical handoff.","counterfactual_removal":"Without end-to-end restoration, archive status does not establish that a prior situation display can still be recovered and interpreted."}],"causal_chain":["Successive shifts append external memory cues faster than owners explicitly retire them.","Resolved, contradicted, or superseded cues retain active visibility beside unresolved cues.","The incoming operator must allocate bounded attention across the enlarged cue field.","Stale cues can capture attention or enter the operator's current situation model as if still authoritative.","Creation-time review horizons and semantic staleness checks make continued active status inspectable and renewable.","Human review, safety pins, and dependency gates separate genuinely unresolved cues from historical deposits.","Capacity-triggered demotion bounds the active board while retaining searchable access to recently retired cues.","Retention exceptions, quarantine, tombstones, and tested archives preserve accountability and reconstruction.","The handoff surface presents a bounded set of validated current cues without treating historical disappearance as the price of reduced cognitive clutter."],"baseline":"Operators append notes to a chronological handoff board and use urgency labels, free-text resolved annotations, or manual deletion. Older entries remain visible until someone cleans them up, and the archival log is separate from the active display without consistent identity, successor, dependency, expiry, or restoration controls.","nearest_rivals":["A chronological handoff log with manual resolved checkboxes","A severity-sorted board that keeps every cue visible","A supervisor-led cleanup at the end of each shift","An incident-management system that tracks formal tickets but not informal prospective-memory cues","Alert deduplication that merges repeated signals without governing their historical lifecycle"],"remaining_contrastive_claim":"The proposal's testable differentiator is lifecycle control over externalized cognitive cues: continued active visibility must be renewed, active-display capacity causes safe demotion rather than deletion, and historical accountability is preserved through dependency gates and reconstructable archives. Priority sorting, resolved checkboxes, or incident tickets can organize current work, but do not by themselves manage the full transition from attention-demanding cue to historical evidence.","authority_safety":{"decision_authority":"Cue owners validate content; the shift supervisor authorizes active-tier removal or renewal; incident, safety, and records authorities control holds and destruction eligibility. Automated scores and eviction rules may recommend or demote only within approved nonpinned classes.","authorized_first_step":"Create a read-only shadow lifecycle view from one bounded set of historical or synthetic handoff entries and evaluate it in an authorized simulation without changing the operational board.","excluded_actions":["Automatic concealment of an unacknowledged safety-critical cue","Hard deletion of incident, safety, investigation, or held records","Use of age or access frequency as the sole basis for demotion","Changing equipment state, procedures, alarms, or live operator instructions","Replacing the official handoff or incident record during the first evidence step","Inferring that a condition is resolved solely because its cue is inactive","Collecting operator-performance data outside the authorization governing the simulation"],"halt_rollback":"Halt if a known unresolved cue is classified as stale, a pinned cue is demoted, a dependency or hold is omitted, restricted content is exposed, or a sampled historical board cannot be restored. Rollback consists of disabling the shadow view and discarding its derived lifecycle labels; the official board and source records remain unchanged."},"negative_tests":{"strongest_counterevidence":"If handoff failures arise from ambiguous writing, missing observations, or poor alarm design rather than accumulated stale cues, a lifecycle system will reorganize the display without correcting the consequential information deficit. A well-maintained incident system with reliable resolution states and filters may already provide the needed separation.","problem_falsifier":"In the bounded handoff corpus, all visible cues have accurate current states and owners, resolved or superseded cues are absent from the active view, designated unresolved cues are consistently found, and historical handoffs are already reconstructable from linked records.","intervention_falsifier":"In controlled handoff scenarios, the lifecycle view does not improve discrimination between current and superseded cues relative to a priority-sorted resolved-checkbox rival, or it causes any designated unresolved cue to be missed, adds unmanageable review time, produces false stale classifications, or fails historical reconstruction.","risks":["A fixed active-cue budget can hide a rare but consequential condition.","Short review horizons can create premature expiry and false reassurance.","Operators may game urgency or pinning to keep their cues visible.","Frequent renewal requests can add handoff workload and become perfunctory.","A stale flag can be mistaken for proof that the underlying condition is resolved.","Automated demotion can weaken shared awareness if the warm tier is difficult to search.","Incomplete dependency maps can sever the explanation for a prior decision.","Preservation holds can accumulate until the archive becomes difficult to interpret.","Quarantine may conflict with a binding destruction requirement because the content still exists.","Tombstones can themselves become clutter if their retention is unmanaged." ]},"next_evidence_step":"Select one bounded historical or synthetic control-room scenario containing deposits from several simulated shifts, a known set of unresolved conditions, superseded cues, and an incident sequence requiring reconstruction. Build three read-only views: the existing chronological board, a priority-sorted resolved-checkbox rival, and the lifecycle shadow board. In an appropriately authorized simulation, record whether incoming operators identify every designated unresolved condition, reject superseded instructions, reconstruct the reason for one prior action, and complete the review within the available handoff interval. Separately test restoration of one archived board state and audit every lifecycle classification with a supervisor. Do not change the live board or delete any source record.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","diversity_from_prior_proposals":"Proposal 1 governs laboratory protocol artifacts whose stale versions can be assembled into an incompatible experiment or analysis package; this proposal instead governs transient external memory cues consumed during shift handoff, and its causal path runs through attentional competition and situation-model formation rather than artifact selection. Proposal 2 governs historical behavioral evidence inside an adaptive user-state estimator; this proposal does not change a latent-state model or the evidentiary weight of participant observations, but bounds a human-facing prospective-memory workspace and demotes cues after owner validation. Its central intervention—a capacity-bounded active cue tier with renewable handoff status, safety pins, and reconstructable cue history—is independently adoptable even where research protocols are well versioned and no longitudinal adaptive model exists.","revision_record":{"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":["Initial complete specification for proposal index 3","Explicit material differentiation from sealed proposals 1 and 2","Operational mapping of layer expiry to externalized cognitive cues","Authority, safeguards, falsifiers, and bounded simulation evidence"],"conceptual_changes":["Initial version; no parent proposal","Targets shared attention and prospective-memory cue accumulation rather than protocol-version selection or adaptive-model evidence weighting"],"operational_changes":["Initial version; defines renewable cue lifecycles, a bounded active tier, safety-pinned exceptions, warm-tier demotion, and reconstructable archives"],"evidence_changes":["Initial version; specifies a controlled comparison with chronological and priority-sorted handoff views plus an archive-restoration test"],"claim_changes":["Initial version; limits the contrastive claim to governed lifecycle transitions for external cognitive cues","Makes no claim of novelty, prevalence, demand, or effect size"]}}