Expectation as Criterion: A Cross-Modal Real-Time Calibration Mechanism of Human Sensory Judgment

Author Information Author: Baichen Yi Preprint V1.0 Affiliation: Independent Researcher, Xi'an, Shaanxi, 710000, China ORCID: 0009-0008-6242-7743 Corresponding Author: Baichen Yi Email:ybcbenxin@163.com Conflict of Interest Statement: The author declares that there are no conflicts of interest related to this work. Copyright and License This preprint is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), permitting open sharing and redistribution worldwide under the conditions of proper attribution, non-commercial use, and no derivative works. Special Authorization Statement: The author expressly authorizes any individual or institution to translate this article, in whole or in part, into other languages. Translated versions must preserve the core logic of the original text and cite the original source and author information. The full license text is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Preprint Statement This article is a preprint that has not undergone peer review. It proposes testable structural hypotheses based on cross-modal phenomenological induction and reinterpretation of existing literature. All falsification conditions and operationalization criteria are presented in §6. Abstract Background: The MFY three-variable steady-state model has achieved cross-domain validation across multiple fields including psychology, economics, motor skill acquisition, AI alignment, mammalian behavior, and placebo effects. The proposition that "expectation Y is the sole legitimate intervention target of the system" has been supported by multiple independent lines of evidence. However, these validations have focused on behavioral and decision-making levels, leaving untouched a more fundamental question: where do the criteria of subjective experience in the human sensory system itself — taste, vision, olfaction, audition, somatosensation, spatial distance perception, and proprioception — come from? Method: Starting from six cross-modal sensory calibration phenomena and integrating the Y variable definition and M₁→F₁→Y→F₂→M₂ transmission structure of the MFY framework, this article proposes and argues for a unified proposition: the subjective judgment criteria of all sensory modalities are real-time calibrated by expectation Y; neural transmission serves as the physical carrier of signals, while Y is the determinant of criteria. This work is fully compatible with existing findings in sensory neuroscience regarding signal transmission mechanisms, and addresses a long-standing question that has never been directly answered: where does the "judgment criterion" come from after signals arrive, and how does it change? Results: Drawing on six sensory modalities — taste/olfaction (flavor adaptation and cross-cultural dietary experience reversal), somatosensation/pain (tactile adaptation and placebo/nocebo effects), audition (auditory adaptation and soundscape calibration), spatial distance perception (distance judgment calibration in driving and martial arts), proprioception (body schema calibration in motor skill acquisition), and vision (Y recalibration under irreversible physical changes) — this article identifies six unified characteristics of sensory system Y calibration, and forms cross-validation with the Y/M dual-layer defense mechanism in Paper 1 §4.6, the expectation lock-in theory in Paper 8, and the signal-source dependence of the inflation coefficient in Paper 10. Conclusion: "Y is the criterion itself" is not a local regularity confined to a single domain, but a unified mechanism covering the full hierarchy from sensation to cognition to behavior. The real-time calibration of Y in the sensory system provides the most fundamental and universal empirical evidence for the MFY framework, elevating "expectation-driven" from a psychological hypothesis to a testable proposition about the foundational structure of the sensory-cognitive system.