The Relative Novelty-Salience Memory Trajectory Framework (RNSMTF)

AbstractThe Relative Novelty-Salience Memory Trajectory Framework (RNSMTF) is proposed asan integrative account of how the relative novelty of an experience, its affective and personalsignificance, selective attention, memory encoding, post-encoding processes, and retrievalcues may jointly shape which elements of an experience remain accessible and later enterconscious recollection.Its primary illustrative case is a person who visits an unfamiliar place, experiences onegarden scene as particularly distinctive or meaningful, and later recalls that scene involuntarilywhile studying.The framework treats novelty as relative to a person's evolving reference state rather thanas an absolute property of a stimulus. It distinguishes novelty from surprise, arousal, valence,personal relevance, attentional allocation, memory availability, recollective vividness, andmemory accuracy.Version 1.1 adds a transversal life-course component, the Life-Course Relative Dynamicsand Person-Specific Trajectory layer (LCRD-PST), to connect event-level processing withperson-specific change over time and with broader cognitive, autobiographical, and socialcontexts.Candidate equations are provided for normalized novelty indices, feature-selection weights,encoding probability, memory-state evolution, cue-dependent retrieval, and time-varyingindividual parameters. The equations are explicitly presented as model proposals rather thanknown neural laws.The manuscript defines a 21-layer architecture, testable hypotheses, competing explana-tions, boundary conditions, a falsification strategy, measurement requirements, and a stagedresearch roadmap.The central claim is methodological: one common functional architecture may be usedto investigate recurring relations among experience, relative evaluation, memory processing,retrieval, and later reference-state change, while permitting individual differences and context-dependent outcomes.Whether this integration adds predictive value beyond simpler models remains an empiricalquestion.Keywords: relative novelty; affective salience; episodic memory; involuntary autobiographicalmemory; memory consolidation; cue-dependent retrieval; individual differences; life-coursedynamics; computational modelling; falsifiability.