Structural Diagnosis: How Reward-Modulated Cognition Phase-Shifts Into ADHD and Schizophrenia

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Introduction: From Labels to Architecture

Many symptom descriptions focus on what a person experiences: distraction, impulsivity, hallucinations, flattened affect, or social withdrawal. Those observations are real, but they do not explain why the underlying system settles into those patterns. A structural approach asks a different question: what changes in the machinery of cognition so that certain kinds of thoughts and actions become easier to promote, harder to contain, or harder to sustain?

The central claim of this article is simple. Cognition is not only what we think; it is how candidate thoughts compete for attention, how they are validated, and how they become stable enough to guide belief or action. If that selection machinery is persistently biased—especially by reward dynamics—then the system can drift into a new equilibrium. Structural diagnosis names these equilibria as regimes rather than treating each diagnostic label as an entirely separate mystery.

To make the model concrete, this article uses the Adaptive Query™ (AQ) framework as a vocabulary for cognition-native execution. You do not need to know AQ to follow the argument. The terms introduced below are used only to keep the structure explicit: speculation, modulation, validation, promotion, and containment.

References to ADHD and schizophrenia are used descriptively to anchor the discussion in familiar diagnostic language. They are not intended to replace, revise, or compete with clinical diagnostic systems, and no medical or psychiatric authority is asserted.

1. The Primitive: Speculation, Modulation, and Promotion

In cognition-native systems, speculation is not an error. It is a structural primitive. The mind generates candidate interpretations, futures, and actions in a sandboxed space where exploration can occur without commitment. Healthy cognition depends on the separation between speculation and promotion.

Three coordinated mechanisms determine whether speculation becomes belief or action. Forecasting generates the candidate graph. Affective state modulates evaluation strictness, persistence, and salience. Integrity constraints bound deviation by enforcing attribution, re-verification, and recoverable promotion. When these mechanisms remain coordinated, the system can explore widely without losing governability.

2. Reward as Structural Modulation, Not Authority

Reward signals are commonly treated as if they grant permission. In this model, they do not. Reward is treated as modulation: a control input that biases how speculative branches are evaluated, how long they persist, and how easily they compete for promotion. Modulation can increase perceived salience, urgency, and relevance, but it cannot legitimately convert speculation into truth.

This distinction is critical. If reward were authority, then high salience would imply high correctness. In healthy cognition, the opposite is often true: highly salient candidates are frequently the ones most in need of re-verification. Structural safety therefore depends on preserving a separation between felt importance and validated promotion.

3. Reward Fatigue and Calibration Drift

Over time, sustained modulation pressure can degrade the system’s ability to maintain stable thresholds. Reward fatigue in this frame is not merely hedonic desensitization. It is structural erosion: repeated reinforcement of short-horizon candidates without sufficient re-verification causes promotion boundaries to drift, and it reduces the stability of long-horizon containment.

When this occurs, speculative branches begin to feel self-validating. The system becomes biased toward immediacy. Branch persistence becomes uneven. Integrity constraints strain as divergence accumulates and re-verification becomes harder to maintain. The architecture does not collapse instantly; it phase-shifts through intermediate regimes.

4. Two Regimes on the Continuum: ADHD and Schizophrenia

ADHD and schizophrenia can be modeled as different outcomes of sustained reward-modulated drift. They are not treated here as identical conditions. They are treated as different equilibrium points of the same underlying architecture: how speculation is contained, how promotion is calibrated, and how execution is stabilized across time.

ADHD: Biased Execution With Preserved Containment

In ADHD-like regimes, reward modulation biases novelty and urgency, increasing the competitive weight of short-horizon branches. Containment largely holds: speculation remains sandboxed and is not typically promoted into fixed delusional belief. The dysfunction appears primarily in execution stability. Attention drifts because branch persistence is uneven, and promotion is repeatedly pulled toward immediate salience rather than long-horizon intent.

In AQ terms, the planning graph remains productive, but promotion is biased toward branches that feel urgent, new, or rewarding. Integrity constraints remain broadly intact, but the system experiences chronic volatility: task initiation, completion, and sustained focus degrade because the promotion system is repeatedly reweighted by modulation.

Schizophrenia: Containment Collapse and Oscillatory Overcorrection

In schizophrenia-like regimes, deeper containment erosion occurs. Reward-biased salience begins to influence not only execution but belief formation. Speculative branches may escape containment and be promoted prematurely, producing the positive symptom cluster. The system may then overcorrect by tightening thresholds excessively, suppressing even valid promotion and producing the negative symptom cluster.

The polarity is structural. Positive symptoms reflect over-permissive promotion, where speculation is mistaken for externally sourced reality or stable truth. Negative symptoms reflect over-restrictive suppression, where even coherent candidates fail to persist long enough to become speech, intention, or social engagement. Both can arise from the same destabilized calibration system, oscillating between unsafe openness and rigid shutdown.

5. Preserving Nuance: Positive and Negative Symptoms as Opposing Calibration Failures

A key advantage of structural diagnosis is that it preserves symptom nuance without treating symptom categories as separate mysteries. Positive and negative symptoms are not different disorders. They are opposite expressions of the same miscalibrated promotion system.

When promotion is too permissive, speculative candidates gain belief weight without adequate grounding. Internally generated percepts can be treated as external. Weak hypotheses can become immovable convictions. Associative drift can overwhelm coherent pruning. When promotion is too restrictive, cognition becomes incapable of commitment: affect flattens, speech becomes sparse, and intention fails to translate into action. In both cases, the core failure is governance of speculation, not the mere presence of unusual content.

6. How Affect Reshapes Forecasting, Planning, and Execution

Reward-biased modulation changes which futures persist long enough to be evaluated. It changes which branches are treated as reachable. It changes how aggressively the system prunes. Over time, these biases reshape the executive graph itself: what the agent can plan, what it can sustain, and what it can safely promote.

When reward modulation is chronic and unbalanced, the system’s planning becomes short-horizon. Re-verification becomes costly. Integrity constraints become either porous or rigid. The result is not moral weakness and not a lack of intelligence. It is a shift in what the architecture can govern under pressure.

7. Implications for Recovery: Structural Repair, Not Content Suppression

If these regimes arise from calibration drift rather than content error, recovery must emphasize structural repair. Medication can shift threshold parameters and reduce unsafe promotion, but long-term stability requires rebuilding containment, re-verification practices, and long-horizon continuity. Rhythm, sleep, environmental predictability, reduced chaos, and narrative continuity reduce entropic load and give validation systems room to stabilize.

Discussion of recovery emphasizes structural interpretation rather than clinical prescription. No therapeutic methods, interventions, timelines, or outcomes are recommended, and this section should not be interpreted as medical or psychological guidance.

In AQ terms, the objective is not to eliminate speculation. It is to restore governability: stable promotion thresholds, bounded deviation, and a reliable distinction between what is imagined, what is inferred, and what is validated enough to guide belief and action.

Conclusion

Structural diagnosis reframes psychiatric categories as regime behaviors of cognition under sustained affective modulation. Reward signals do not grant authority, but they can reshape forecasting, validation, and promotion over time. ADHD can be interpreted as biased execution with preserved containment. Schizophrenia can be interpreted as containment collapse followed by oscillatory overcorrection, producing both positive and negative symptom clusters.

The point is not to collapse clinical nuance into a single story or to assert diagnostic authority. It is to locate observed diagnostic patterns within a governable architectural model. When cognition is modeled as speculation governed by modulation and constraint, familiar diagnostic labels become architecturally legible as phase shifts—descriptive patterns of how a finite system can adapt under sustained pressure, without replacing clinical judgment or diagnostic practice.

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