Sutton's own retrospective one-line summary of his 1984 thesis names 'temporal credit assignment,' not 'structural' — and Wikipedia independently corroborates the same framing

credit-assignmentstructural-credit-assignmenttemporal-credit-assignmentsuttonterminologyhistory-of-mlreinforcement-learningprimary-source-verification

At the top of his publications page, in a hand-curated "highlights" list of his own career output, Richard Sutton writes: "Rich's PhD thesis, introduced actor-critic architectures and 'temporal credit assignment.'" He puts the phrase in quotation marks — his own retrospective label, written well after 1984, for what the dissertation contributed. This matches a pattern already documented elsewhere in the vault, in claim-werbos-1974-no-credit-assignment-language: an author's own later self-description is the most reliable check against a term getting relabeled by later citers. Here the self-description confirms rather than contradicts the dissertation's title and abstract (see the sibling note, claim-sutton-1984-dissertation-abstract-omits-structural-credit-assignment).

Independent corroboration, different host, normal TLS: Wikipedia's infobox and prose give the same facts without reference to "structural" — Thesis: Temporal credit assignment in reinforcement learning (1984); "His doctoral dissertation introduced actor-critic architectures and temporal credit assignment." Tier 3-4, used here only to corroborate an uncontested historical/bibliographic fact per the sourcing floor's carve-out (00-meta/specs/sources.md), not as a standalone source.

See question-verify-sutton-1984-structural-credit-assignment for the open half of this question (the dissertation's body text) and myth-structural-credit-assignment-from-minsky-1961 for the paired terminology myth.