What Is the Skeleton of Cognition? A Structural Account of World Reconstruction through Processing Axes

Authors

• Griselda Poe, CUNY Lehman CollegeFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Spring 5-15-2026

Abstract

This paper describes how the placement of a single processing axis reorganizes human cognition and generates a reconstructed world.

Most existing psychological and social theories begin from emotion, desire, morality, or social behavior. In doing so, they have discussed what forms on top of the cognitive skeleton without first fixing the skeleton itself. When the skeleton is not fixed, entirely different explanations of the same phenomenon can coexist, and it becomes difficult to identify which constitutes a foundational account.

This paper fixes the skeleton first. That skeleton is the processing axis.

The question is: when a single processing axis organizes human cognition, what kind of world is reconstructed?

This paper operates within the Core-Modulation Architecture (CMA), a layered framework that describes human cognition as a problem of processing conditions rather than content (Poe, 2026a; Poe, 2026s). Two processing axes are described: processing centered on relation / social continuity (EF), and processing centered on coherence / internal constraint (CF).

When the relation axis is placed, the world is reconstructed around hierarchy, role organization, narrative continuation, and self-return. When the coherence axis is placed, the world is reconstructed around contradiction retention, same-person continuity, and predictability stabilization.

These are not differences in personality or morality. They are structural consequences that necessarily derive from differences in processing axis.

The emergence of AI systems has made it possible, for the first time, to observe from outside the differences in world reconstruction generated by divergent processing axes. Reconstruction operations that humans have long performed naturally have become visible through AI systems.

Phenomena such as ranking, role switching, historical recurrence, and hallucination are not separate psychological phenomena. They are structural consequences of processing axes.

Psychology and behavior are downstream consequences of the processing skeleton. The problem is not content. It is which axis is used to process the world.

Comments

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20216001

The Core-Modulation Architecture (CMA): Paper 22 (v-WSC)