Norepinephrine-like signal
The urgency and arousal channel of the affect state vector. High values increase the salience weight of time-sensitive and high-risk signals and compress deliberation budget toward faster decisions. Elevated during high-stakes or time-constrained operational contexts.
The norepinephrine-like channel of affect state represents a kind of cognitive urgency. When elevated - due to detected risk, deadline pressure, or rapidly escalating operational events - it shifts attention salience weighting to emphasize urgency and risk dimensions over novelty and long-horizon goal relevance. The budget engine responds to elevated norepinephrine-like signal by compressing deliberation: reducing the number of agents dispatched, shortening retrieval depth, and favoring faster decision paths. This mirrors the biological fight-or-flight response: acute threat narrows focus and speeds action at the cost of deliberative depth. The temporal engine reads this channel when computing urgency gradients for planning horizon allocation. Like all affect state channels, the norepinephrine-like signal is updated based on environmental signals and decays toward a baseline without continued stimulation.