Abstract
This paper examines how cognitive regulatory architectures are encoded, enforced, and naturalized within narrative and media systems. It treats cultural forms — television, film, literature — as ecological environments that structure the distribution of interpretive authority, shaping whose cognition is legible, credible, and governable. Through analysis of twice-exceptional characters on television, the paper demonstrates how autistic cognition is systematically filtered through neurotypical mediation, producing representations that are conditionally legible only when they conform to non-autistic interpretive frameworks.
Research Question
How are cognitive architectures encoded and governed within cultural narratives?
Plain Language Summary
Movies, TV shows, and books shape how society thinks about autism. This research looks at how media either helps or harms autistic people by the stories it tells. When TV shows portray autistic characters, who gets to decide what those characters are like? Often, the stories are filtered through non-autistic perspectives, which can distort how autistic people are understood.
Position in the Research Program
This paper spans all five preceding levels simultaneously, demonstrating that cultural forms are not neutral mirrors but active participants in constructing whose cognition counts as legitimate. At the architectural level (Paper I), cultural narratives encode one cognitive architecture as the normative standard and the other as deviation. At the computational level (Paper II), media representations shape the energetic demands placed on different cognitive architectures by defining what counts as "normal" social behavior. At the experiential level (Paper III), cultural narratives determine whose suffering is recognized and whose is dismissed — whose burnout is legitimate and whose is character flaw. At the mechanistic level (Paper IV), cultural systems determine which biological pathways are studied, which symptoms are medicalized, and which bodies are treated as inherently defective. At the ecological level (Paper V), cultural forms are part of the environment — they constitute the social ecosystem within which cognitive architectures must survive. This paper shows that representation is not a separate domain but a force that operates across every level of the research program.