The Fresh Start Effect triggers goal initiation at temporal-landmark onset, but only when the landmark is subjectively framed as a new beginning

Dai, Milkman & Riis (Psychological Science, 2015; PMC full text directly fetched) give the most literal cross-domain precedent for "a boundary event, not accumulated strain, functions as a trigger" — but for human goal pursuit, not knowledge structures. The mechanism: "people's strengthened motivation to begin pursuing their aspirations following such temporal landmarks originates in part from the psychological disassociation these landmarks induce from a person's past, imperfect self" — the boundary spurs goal initiation by widening the felt distance between the current self and the imperfect past self (the paper's terms are "imperfect self" and "disassociation," not "inferior self" or "disconnect").

The load-bearing caveat, confirmed in the same paper: the effect depends on the landmark being subjectively experienced as a new period, not merely on a boundary occurring. Their Study 4 varied whether an identical event (a house move) was framed as ending an old period or starting a new one and found the framing — not the event — drove the effect: "when the same landmark (a move) is made to feel more like the beginning of a new period, it boosts goal-pursuit motivation in part by increasing the subjective distance separating the current self from the imperfect past self." A companion Management Science paper (Dai, Milkman & Riis 2014) states the mechanism in near-identical terms, but that quote is Tier-2 (reproduced by a bibliographic aggregator, publisher/SSRN access-blocked) and corroborating only — [unverified-quote — Tier 2, not primary-confirmed].

Mapped onto the vault's hypothesis, this converges with the organizational finding (claim-executive-succession-restructuring-runs-through-actor-action): in both domains, the bare boundary is not enough — it must be used or framed as new. The open question it implies is whether a new session ID alone carries a "subjective new-period" quality for an LLM agent, or whether it must be deliberately told to treat itself as a fresh start (an explicit "audit accordingly" instruction) to produce anything like the effect. The paper does not address AI agents; that mapping is speculative and lives at question-new-session-onset-as-rewiring-trigger. See moc-schema-change-and-restructuring.