Outsourced Anchoring with Emotional Indexing: A Theoretical Proposal for a Cognitive Architecture Model of ADHD and Neurodivergent Function

This paper proposes Outsourced Anchoring with Emotional Indexing (OAEI), a positive cognitive architecture model of ADHD and broader neurodivergent function. Rather than framing ADHD as a constellation of deficits, OAEI describes a four-stage pipeline — processing emotion, finding the pattern, sorting, react or resolve — that operates effectively under conditions matching its operational requirements and produces ADHD’s observable difficulties under conditions designed for neurotypical operation. Working memory constraints are managed through three steps: outsourcing load to environmental patterns, anchoring to those patterns, and hyperfixating on a singular destination — a domain-general operation termed structural triage. Centrally, the model proposes that emotion functions as a recruited overflow resource: at working-memory saturation, fragments are bound to the active affective state, changing the retrieval key rather than the storage substrate. This account is integrated with the dopaminergic reward-prediction model: an immediate affective spike is plausibly the phasic event that clears the fronto-striatal gate, while anticipated load keeps working memory pre-occupied, guaranteeing overflow to route. Two consequences follow: carrier binding, in which content routed through the affective pathway binds to the person through whom it was delivered, and frame protection, a predictive response to anticipated overflow reliably misread as procrastination. The resulting Architectural Mismatch Hypothesis yields two falsifiable predictions — the Inverted Performance Gradient and the Carrier-Binding Prediction — and an intervention category, cognitive modeling, in which the externalized architecture runs visibly alongside the user as a continuously available overflow resource.