Decision Latency, Clockability, and Implicit Regime Filtering in Cognitive Testing

This technical note examines cognitive testing as an interface-mediated process, focusing on decision latency and temporal comparability as structural constraints on recognition. Cognitive tests are treated not as direct measures of cognitive ability, but as projection interfaces that map internal processes onto externally observable responses under implicit assumptions of shared clockability. The analysis shows that when clockability is degraded or context-dependent, decision latency ceases to be a simple performance metric and becomes a marker of regime-specific access to temporal representation. Under these conditions, aggregated statistics function as implicit regime filters, stabilizing outcomes while absorbing structurally incompatible responses as variability or noise. The argument is supported through a structural reinterpretation of established experimental findings, including studies on decision latency and the Spatial–Temporal Association of Response Codes (STEARC), where compensatory spatial representations of time emerge selectively in slow or uncertain temporal judgments. No new experimental data are introduced. The contribution is purely diagnostic and methodological, introducing no cognitive taxonomy, hierarchy of value, or ontological claims. Its purpose is to clarify the domain of validity of cognitive tests and to isolate structural limits of recognition arising from interface mismatch and temporal non-comparability.