Encoding, Retrieval & Substrate Mapping

Primes about how information is stored on and read from a substrate: encoding specificity and reconsolidation govern how memory is written and rewritten on retrieval, topographic map and receptive field describe spatial encoding, and category retrieval lock-in and reification examine how a stored label can crowd out its referent.

9 primes in this family — primes that sit near one another in abstraction space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Category Retrieval Lock In — A category label that made routine retrieval cheap obstructs novel re-use, because the retrieval infrastructure has compiled the label in place of the property list.
• Encoding Specificity — Retrievability depends on the overlap between features active at encoding and features available at retrieval, because context is co-encoded into the storage key.
• Navigation — A positioned agent moves through a structured space toward a goal using an incomplete map, staying oriented at each step.
• Receptive Field — A processing unit responds only to inputs falling inside a bounded region of an input space, so a large system covers its input by tiling many such local jurisdictions.
• Reconsolidation — A stored item returns to a malleable state when retrieved and must be re-stored, so every retrieval is a read-modify-write and a potential edit of the original.
• Reification — An abstraction designed to summarise a substrate is treated as the substrate itself, with the audit trail back to the original allowed to atrophy.
• Remapping — A single substrate holds multiple disjoint, context-keyed representations and switches discretely between them on a context cue, preserving inactive ones for later re-entry.
• Substrate-Cued Behavior Recruitment — Modifying a substrate so that perceiving it elicits a target behavior without explicit instruction.
• Topographic Map — A source space is laid out on a substrate by a neighbourhood-preserving map with non-uniform magnification, so positions encode relationships and damage to a substrate region predicts a localised source deficit.