Cognitive Mediation of Relational Evidence: An Investigation of Epistemic Judgment and Reliance

Human observers can encounter representations of the same relational contribution history yet form different beliefs about its significance and trustworthiness. This third paper in a coordinated research programme investigates cognitive processes between the structural availability of evidence and an observer’s assessment of a person, claim, or contribution. Its proposed analytic objects are selective attention, evidence encoding, reconstructive memory, attribution, interpretive schemas, belief revision, epistemic vigilance, and behavioral reliance. The inquiry distinguishes evidentiary accessibility from cognitive encounter, subjective confidence from justified assessment, and expressed trust from risk-bearing cooperation. Prior work in attention, working memory, judgment under uncertainty, epistemic vigilance, and trust in automation motivates a provisional sequential-kernel architecture; that architecture remains a research proposal rather than a validated general cognitive model. AI-mediated information environments supply a historically relevant application, without defining the paper’s full scope. This working draft contains all ten planned sections, covering cognitive interfaces, selective attention, memory-based trajectory reconstruction, contribution attribution, proposition-specific belief revision, testimony evaluation, behavioral reliance, empirical designs with explicit identification boundaries, and a synthesis of conditional theoretical findings. It reports no original empirical results.