Salience & Confidence

Every memory carries two meta-cognitive scores that influence how it is handled: salience (emotional/motivational significance) and confidence (epistemic certainty). Together, they determine which memories are protected from pruning and which should be flagged as uncertain during recall.

Salience (0.0 - 1.0)

Salience captures how emotionally or motivationally significant a memory is. High-salience memories represent things that deeply matter — critical decisions, hard-won lessons, or personally important events.

Salience Levels

Protection From Pruning

Memories with salience >= 0.7 are never auto-pruned. Even if their strength decays below the archive threshold (0.1), they will not be moved to _archived/ during the sleep cycle. They must be explicitly removed via /brain:forget or /brain:sunshine.

This models how emotionally significant memories persist in the human brain long after neutral memories fade.

Consolidation Anchoring

During consolidation, the memory with the highest salience in a group serves as the anchor. Its framing, key details, and perspective take priority in the synthesized result. Lower-salience memories in the group contribute supplementary details.

Scoring Impact

Salience contributes 0.08 (8%) of the scoring formula:

score = 0.38 * relevance
      + 0.18 * decayed_strength
      + 0.08 * recency_bonus
      + 0.14 * spreading_bonus
      + 0.14 * context_match
      + 0.08 * salience          ← this factor

While 8% may seem modest, for memories with similar relevance and strength scores, salience can be the tiebreaker that determines which memory surfaces.

Synaptic Homeostasis Re-Boost

During the Synaptic Homeostasis phase of sleep, high-salience memories receive selective re-boosts after the global downscaling. This means important memories are preserved even when the overall memory system is being normalized.

Confidence (0.0 - 1.0)

Confidence tracks how epistemically certain a memory is — how much you should trust it. Not all memories are equally reliable. Some are well-established facts, while others are tentative observations or secondhand information.

Confidence Levels

How Confidence Is Set

Confidence is initially set at encoding time based on the quality of the source:

• Direct experience — You did it yourself, saw the result → 0.8-1.0
• Reliable documentation — Official docs, peer-reviewed sources → 0.7-0.9
• Team knowledge — Information from colleagues → 0.5-0.7
• Secondhand or inferred — Heard from someone, read in a forum → 0.3-0.5
• Speculation or assumption — Educated guess, untested hypothesis → 0.1-0.3

How Confidence Changes

Confidence is not static. It changes through several mechanisms:

Knowledge Propagation (during sleep):

• When new evidence contradicts a stored memory, its confidence is reduced by -0.20
• When new evidence validates a stored memory, its confidence is boosted by +0.10

Manual adjustment:

• You can ask the agent to update a memory's confidence when you discover new information

Low-Confidence Flagging

During recall, memories with confidence < 0.5 that have been accessed frequently (access_count >= 3) are flagged:

⚠️ 2 frequently-used memories have low confidence — consider verifying

This warns you that you are relying on uncertain information. The agent may also add a caveat when referencing a low-confidence memory during a session.

Salience vs. Confidence

These two dimensions are independent: