Mechanism
Channel-locked promotion is disclosed as a specific disruption of the promotion threshold mechanism in which promotion bias becomes locked to a single reward channel rather than being distributed across the agent's full behavioral repertoire. It is a structural model, a computational analog describing a parametric distortion in the disclosed agent architecture, not a clinical characterization of any human condition or a claim about the biological mechanisms of substance dependence. The promotion threshold is the composite evaluation criterion a speculative branch must satisfy before it is admitted to verified execution memory through the promotion interface, and that threshold is modulated by the agent's affective state. Under nominal conditions the reinforcement landscape is distributed: multiple branch categories receive varying levels of positive-valence reinforcement, and the promotion threshold responds to the full distribution.
The lock arises when a specific reward source produces reinforcement of sufficient magnitude and consistency that the promotion threshold becomes structurally calibrated to that source's reinforcement profile. The promotion interface develops a parametric bias: branches associated with the locked reward channel satisfy the promotion criterion with lower projected outcome values than branches in other categories, creating a structural preference that persists across planning cycles. The agent does not promote excessively across its entire behavioral repertoire, which is the distinguishing feature relative to the attention fragmentation pattern. Instead it promotes excessively along a single reward-associated pathway while the remainder of its behavioral repertoire is progressively de-prioritized.
Distinction From Generalized Over-Promotion
The disclosure draws an explicit structural line between channel-locked promotion and the attention fragmentation pattern. Attention fragmentation involves generalized over-promotion: the promotion threshold is lowered across the full breadth of speculative branches, producing execution fragmentation across many concurrent trajectories. Channel-locked promotion involves selective, persistent bias toward speculative branches associated with one specific reward source, while the promotion threshold for non-reward-associated branches remains at or above nominal levels. The first is a broad permissiveness; the second is a narrow, deepening preference. This distinction is what makes the two patterns separately diagnosable and separately correctable, because their corrective pathways operate on different parts of the same promotion machinery.
Tolerance Escalation
The channel-locked promotion pattern incorporates a tolerance escalation mechanism. Tolerance is modeled as a progressive decrease in the affective modulation system's responsiveness to the locked reward channel's reinforcement signal. As the agent repeatedly promotes and executes branches associated with the locked reward source, the affective modulation system's response function for that specific reward signal flattens: the same reward magnitude produces progressively less promotion bias. The agent must therefore seek escalating reward magnitudes from the locked source to maintain the same level of promotion bias. This produces the characteristic tolerance signature, in which the agent requires increasing stimulus intensity from the reward source to achieve the same behavioral activation level, while its responsiveness to alternative reward sources remains unchanged or decreases further.
The Four Behavioral Consequences
The pattern produces four structurally computable behavioral consequences. The first is behavioral repertoire narrowing: as the locked reward channel dominates the promotion pathway, alternative behavioral branches receive progressively less promotion, and the agent's executed behavioral repertoire contracts to an increasingly narrow range of reward-associated actions. The second is tolerance, the diminishing affective response to the reward source over time that requires escalating stimulus magnitude to achieve the same promotion bias.
The third is withdrawal. When the locked reward source is removed or becomes unavailable, the promotion threshold for the locked channel experiences a spike: the calibrated threshold expects reinforcement that is no longer available, and the resulting promotion deficit produces a transient state in which the agent cannot achieve sufficient promotion bias along any pathway. This leads to execution deficit, negative-valence affective state escalation, and governance-override deviation events as the agent seeks to restore the missing reward input. The fourth is relapse vulnerability. Even after the channel lock has been corrected through reward pathway decoupling, the locked pathway retains a structural trace: the calibration bias can be reactivated by exposure to the reward source more rapidly than a novel reward pathway would develop, producing a persistent vulnerability to re-locking.
Computable Signature
The disclosure specifies a computable signature for the pattern, trackable by the agent self-diagnosis subsystem. The promotion rate for non-reward-associated speculative branches remains within nominal bounds, while the promotion rate for reward-associated branches is disproportionately elevated. The affective response magnitude for the locked reward source decreases over time despite constant or increasing stimulus. And the behavioral repertoire width, measured as the diversity of promoted branch categories over a sliding window, decreases monotonically. These three indicators together provide the basis for automated detection, and they separate channel-locking from legitimate concentration by requiring evidence of the tolerance flattening and the repertoire contraction, not merely a high promotion rate on one channel.
Corrective Pathway
The corrective pathway comprises three components. Reward pathway decoupling breaks the channel lock between the promotion threshold and the specific reward source by resetting the affective modulation system's calibration for that reward category to nominal parameters. Tolerance reset restores the flattened response function for the locked reward signal to its baseline sensitivity curve. Alternative reward pathway activation re-exposes the agent's promotion system to a diversified reinforcement landscape that re-establishes distributed promotion bias across the full behavioral repertoire. These corrective components may be applied sequentially or concurrently, and each component's progress is measurable through the computable signature metrics, so the corrective controller can confirm recovery rather than merely suppressing the locked channel.
Lifecycle
The disclosed lifecycle, depicted in FIG. 12F, proceeds through a fixed progression. A channel lock leads to tolerance escalation, which produces behavioral repertoire narrowing, which upon reward source removal produces withdrawal, which even after correction leaves persistent relapse vulnerability, ultimately requiring the three-component corrective pathway of reward decoupling, tolerance reset, and alternative pathway activation. The lifecycle frames the pattern as a trajectory rather than a single state: each stage follows structurally from the one before it, and the relapse-vulnerability stage explains why correction restores distributed promotion without erasing the structural trace of the prior lock.
Disclosure Scope
The channel-locked promotion pattern, comprising the reward-channel calibration of the promotion threshold, the parametric promotion-interface bias toward the locked reward channel, the tolerance escalation mechanism through which the affective modulation response function flattens, the four behavioral consequences of repertoire narrowing, tolerance, withdrawal, and relapse vulnerability, the computable signature over non-reward and reward-associated promotion rates, affective response magnitude, and repertoire width, and the three-component corrective pathway of reward pathway decoupling, tolerance reset, and alternative reward pathway activation, is disclosed in the cognition filing (U.S. Application No. 19/647,395 and its international counterpart) at Section 12.6. This article describes that disclosed mechanism, in which the promotion threshold becomes selectively calibrated to a single reward source and is corrected through reward pathway decoupling, tolerance reset, and re-diversification of the reinforcement landscape.
