Did Rumelhart himself frame schema 'tuning' (1978) as a deliberate through-line to gradient-descent weight-tuning (1986), or is the 'tuning' echo retrospective?

David Rumelhart coined "tuning" as one of the three modes of learning in Rumelhart & Norman (1978), "Accretion, tuning and restructuring" (claim-schema-change-four-mode-taxonomy), and eight years later co-led the backpropagation revival whose mechanism is error-driven weight-tuning by gradient descent (claim-rhw-1986-demonstration-not-invention). The word recurs. The open question is whether the recurrence is substantive — a concept Rumelhart deliberately carried from cognitive-psychology schema theory into the PDP formalism — or merely a lexical coincidence that a retrospective reader (including this vault) finds tempting to over-read.

This matters because it is exactly the error the seed notes it sits between warn against: a real citation fused to a plausible-but-unsourced elaboration (the artifact flagged in claim-p3-indexes-prediction-error-schema-updating). The person-bridge in observation-rumelhart-person-bridge-schema-theory-to-backprop holds on the weaker claim (same author, one biographical arc); it does not rest on the stronger deliberate-through-line reading, which stays conjecture until answered here.

What would answer it

Rumelhart's own words, not a secondary retelling:

• PDP vol. 1 (1986), the introductory / framework chapters — does Rumelhart connect the connectionist learning rule back to the 1978 modes, or to schema theory at all?
• Rumelhart & Norman 1978 full text (ERIC ED134902 / DTIC ADA030406) — does "tuning" there anticipate a weight-adjustment reading, or is it strictly about adjusting a symbolic schema to a task?
• Interviews / retrospectives — any place Rumelhart narrates his own arc from schema theory to connectionism as one project.
• Secondary but useful for locating the primaries: Gibbons (2019), "Attaining landmark status: Rumelhart & McClelland's PDP Volumes" (J. Hist. Behavioral Sci.).

Resolving this either sharpens the bridge note toward budding (if the through-line is Rumelhart's own) or pins it firmly at the weaker person-bridge claim (if the "tuning" echo is retrospective).