When Does Information Become an Affective Stimulus? TM–BM Resonance, Functional Stimulus-Status, and the Internal Locus of Affective Operativity

This preprint introduces the TM–BM Affective Stimulus-Locus framework, a computational account of when represented information becomes affectively operative for a particular observer. The framework formalizes the architecture X → T → R → Z → E → I → A where external sensory or informational input (X) is represented (T), related to observer-specific stored structure through graded resonance or match (R), assigned a functional affective stimulus-status (Z), and followed by downstream affective meaning (E), implementation/readiness (I), and measurable activation or response (A). The distinctive theoretical commitment is the separately typed status Z. TM–BM does not claim novelty for memory, contextual modulation, observer-dependent relevance, appraisal, incentive salience, learned stimulus function, resonance, thresholding, or gating. Instead, it asks whether affective operativity itself constitutes a computational type distinct from graded relevance/resonance, downstream meaning, and measured response: R ≠ Z ≠ E ≠ A. This commitment is deliberately falsifiable. Z earns independent explanatory status only if models containing it provide predictive, distributional, mediational, intervention, or causal value beyond strong non-Z alternatives; otherwise the typed-status hypothesis should be narrowed or rejected. The paper develops this claim through a four-study evidence programme. Study 1 tests computational mechanism recovery. Study 2 asks whether a latent-status formulation produces distinguishable observable structure beyond a closely matched continuous alternative under shared inputs. Study 3 tests whether instructed threat/safety reassignment is reflected in human physiology before new reinforcement. Study 4 examines misleading-information trust violation and subsequent repair, with behavioral evidence primary and EEG differentiation secondary and qualified. The framework also develops the Blind Match implication: functional validity need not equal epistemic truth. A representation may become functionally operative even when its correspondence to external reality is poor, while later reliability or corrective information may alter that status. The present studies motivate this distinction but do not uniquely identify false-belief physiology or latent Z in humans. The accompanying Supplementary Material provides extended mathematical specification, methods, robustness and sensitivity analyses, source provenance, identification ceilings, and falsification criteria. The Reproducibility Package contains the authoritative Study 1–4 analysis notebooks, derived results, provenance documentation, manifest, and SHA-256 checksums. Third-party raw datasets are not redistributed.