Narrative Coupling: Interpretive Charge Accumulation in Stratified Agent Architectures

This companion paper introduces Narrative Coupling as an engine-agnostic mechanism for modeling how meaning begins to “stick” inside an artificial agent. The paper argues that existing architectures often specify perception, memory, and action, while leaving under-defined the intermediate process by which recurring symbolic overlap acquires interpretive force. Narrative Coupling is proposed as that missing middle layer. In this framework, incoming events are represented as symbolic features and compared against an agent’s active symbolic field. When overlap is sufficiently strong, the event contributes interpretive charge to one or more thematic accumulators. Repeated contributions generate thematic pressure, which then biases later perception, recall, and response. The mechanism is intended to explain how identical event streams can produce different internal narrative trajectories across agents without requiring hand-authored story branches or metaphysical claims about objective meaning in the world. The paper positions Narrative Coupling as distinct from semantic identity across environments, shared representation across agents, social field contagion, durable memory persistence, and policy selection. Instead, it is defined as a bounded interpretive accumulation process that operates before memory commitment, identity revision, or action finalization. A lightweight formal framing and a deterministic micro-demo concept are included to make the mechanism testable and portable across host systems. This paper is part of the broader PUTMAN / Spanda research program and serves as a companion architecture note on thematic pressure formation, interpretive adhesion, and agent-specific meaning accumulation in stratified artificial systems.