will.anderson
db7dae8236
The activation persist step was writing wm_weight=0 for every node not reached by the current BFS fan-out. This destroyed working memory accumulated by MCP-layer activations within one tick of the awareness loop firing on an empty inbox. ACT-R and Soar treat spreading activation as additive: absent seeds contribute zero spread, not a zero override of existing WM state. Fix: non-reached nodes now decay by ENGRAM_WM_DECAY (0.7) per activation call rather than being immediately zeroed. A hard floor of 0.005 clears near-zero values to prevent infinite decay tails. Reached nodes behave unchanged.