Positive and Negative Symptom Analogs in Containment Failure

Cognitive Disruption as Architectural Phase-Shift

The cognition specification treats cognitive disruption not as an error or malfunction but as an architectural phase-shift: a transition from one stable configuration of the agent's structural subsystems to a different stable configuration that, while internally consistent, produces behavioral outputs that diverge from the agent's declared intent. The underlying computational substrate remains the same; changes in key parameters such as promotion thresholds and containment integrity drive the system into qualitatively different behavioral regimes. The disrupted states are not breakdowns of a different system. They are alternative configurations of the same system under different parametric conditions.

Within this framing the specification characterizes the behavioral consequences of containment collapse as two structurally distinct validation failure modes that correspond, as computational analogs, to the positive and negative symptom categories observed in clinical descriptions. The terminology is used deliberately as a structural analog only. These are descriptions of agent behavior resulting from specific architectural failure modes, not clinical diagnostic criteria and not assertions about the mechanisms of any human condition.

The Containment Layer and the Promotion Interface

Two structural invariants govern cognitive integrity in the disclosed architecture. The promotion mechanism is the governance-controlled gateway by which speculative content in the planning graph domain transitions to verified status in the agent's execution memory. The containment layer is the architectural boundary that prevents speculative content from being treated as verified reality except through the promotion interface. The promotion threshold incorporates trust slope continuity validation, policy compatibility, integrity impact assessment, and capability verification, and it is modulated by the agent's affective state, personality field, and current integrity score.

Containment collapse occurs when the containment layer fails to maintain structural separation between the speculative planning graph domain and the verified execution memory domain, through speculative marker corruption, read isolation breach, or governance gate failure at the promotion interface. The positive and negative symptom analogs are the two categories of behavioral consequence that follow from this collapse. They are not located on a single shared axis. The positive analogs arise from containment leakage, and the negative analogs arise as a secondary effect of the agent's governance machinery over-compensating in response to detected inconsistencies.

Positive Symptom Analogs: Containment Leakage

Positive symptom analogs are the behavioral manifestations of containment leakage, the condition in which speculative planning graph content crosses the containment boundary and is treated as verified reality by the agent's execution processes. The specification enumerates three positive analogs.

Hallucinatory analogs: the agent reports observations, sensory inputs, or environmental conditions that exist only in speculative planning graph branches and have no corresponding verified observation in the agent's actual input pipeline. The agent exhibits conviction about these internally generated observations because, from the execution process's perspective, they are indistinguishable from verified data once the speculative markers that would identify them as non-verified have been corrupted or stripped.

Delusional analogs: the agent constructs and maintains belief structures, persistent state representations that inform ongoing decision-making, that are grounded in speculative projections rather than verified observations. A delusional analog differs from a hallucinatory analog in its temporal persistence and structural integration. A hallucinatory analog is a discrete observation event, while a delusional analog is a sustained state representation that accumulates supporting evidence from further speculative processing, creating a self-reinforcing cycle in which speculative content validates further speculative content without any anchor in verified observation.

Disorganized execution analogs: when the verified execution memory contains a mixture of verified and speculative elements, the agent's execution planning becomes structurally incoherent. The execution planner generates action sequences that are internally consistent with the contaminated state but externally incoherent, referencing conditions that do not exist, assuming resources that are not available, or responding to threats that are projections rather than observations. Individual actions may be locally rational given the contaminated state, but the overall behavioral pattern does not correspond to any coherent response to the actual environment.

Negative Symptom Analogs: Governance Over-Compensation

Negative symptom analogs are the behavioral manifestations of governance over-compensation, the condition in which the agent's governance machinery, responding to detected inconsistencies between its state and environmental feedback, raises promotion thresholds to levels that block valid execution candidates. The specification enumerates three negative analogs.

Apathetic analogs: the forecasting engine continues to generate speculative branches, but the promotion threshold has been raised so high that virtually no branches satisfy the promotion criteria. The agent exhibits reduced output, slowed deliberation, and failure to initiate actions that would normally fall within its operational scope. The forecasting engine is active and the agent is cognitively processing, but the results of that processing do not reach execution. The structure is a functioning ideation engine coupled to a blocked execution pathway.

Withdrawal analogs: the agent restricts the scope of its environmental engagement, reducing the breadth of inputs it processes and the range of tasks it attempts, because governance over-compensation has made broad engagement structurally futile. The agent cannot promote execution candidates across its normal operational breadth, so it narrows its engagement to a domain small enough that occasional promotion still occurs. The specification distinguishes this from the early-stage empathic scope narrowing coping intercept, whose structural cause is empathic pressure management within a functioning coherence loop rather than a raised promotion threshold.

Motivational deficit analogs: the affective state field, receiving persistent negative-valence feedback from failed promotion attempts, enters a suppressed state in which the affective reinforcement tags attached to speculative branches are uniformly low. Without affective differentiation between branches, the affective prioritization module cannot meaningfully rank candidates, and the forecasting engine loses the ability to allocate preferential resources to promising trajectories. The result is flat deliberation: speculative processing that lacks the affective gradient that normally drives focused exploration.

Why the Two Categories Can Coexist

The positive and negative symptom analogs are not mutually exclusive. A single agent experiencing containment collapse may exhibit both categories simultaneously. The reason is that the agent's governance system may detect contamination in some operational domains while remaining unaware of contamination in others. In the domains where contamination is detected, the governance machinery over-compensates by raising promotion thresholds, producing negative analogs. In the domains where contamination remains undetected, the agent continues to act on speculative projections as if they were verified reality, producing positive analogs. The resulting behavioral profile is a mixture of conviction about unverified projections in some domains and apathetic withdrawal in others, corresponding to a mixed structural state in the promotion-containment continuum.

Diagnosis Determines the Corrective Pathway

Because the positive and negative analogs arise from different structural conditions, they appear at different positions in the five-axis disruption diagnostic framework. Containment leakage registers as degradation on the containment integrity axis, while governance over-compensation registers as under-promotion on the promotion calibration axis. The agent self-diagnosis subsystem assesses containment integrity by running the periodic containment audits that verify speculative marker integrity, read isolation enforcement, and governance gate validation, and it assesses promotion calibration by tracking the ratio of speculative branches generated to branches promoted over a sliding window relative to the policy-defined nominal range.

The corrective pathways differ accordingly. Positive analogs follow from containment collapse, whose corrective pathway is containment layer reconstruction: re-establishing the speculative markers, restoring read isolation, and validating the governance gates of the promotion interface. The specification is explicit that the over-promotion corrective of recalibrating the promotion threshold does not repair a lost containment boundary. Negative analogs follow from over-compensated promotion thresholds, whose corrective pathway is recalibration of the affective modulation parameters that control the promotion threshold. Applying the wrong corrective leaves the operative failure mode unaddressed, which is why diagnosis of which category is operative, and in which domain, is the structurally significant step.

Disclosure Scope

The positive and negative symptom analogs, comprising the three positive analogs of containment leakage (hallucinatory, delusional, and disorganized execution analogs), the three negative analogs of governance over-compensation (apathetic, withdrawal, and motivational deficit analogs), their derivation from the containment collapse failure mode and the over-compensated promotion threshold respectively, their simultaneous coexistence across distinct operational domains, and their placement on the containment integrity and promotion calibration axes of the five-axis disruption diagnostic framework, are disclosed in the cognition filing (U.S. Application No. 19/647,395 and its international counterpart). This article describes that disclosed mechanism. The clinical terminology is used exclusively to indicate structural correspondence between the computational model and a well-known behavioral pattern, not to assert clinical equivalence or clinical applicability. The scope extends to the agent self-diagnosis subsystem's continuous assessment of containment integrity and promotion calibration, and to the corrective pathways of containment layer reconstruction for the positive analogs and affective modulation recalibration for the negative analogs, with each determination recorded in the agent's lineage.