The brain’s internal model of how things work: causal knowledge about the self and the world, and what is worth pursuing. It is what lets us plan, imagine and learn without having to act first.

Transition priors about oneself: what one can do and what one’s actions bring about — how controllable outcomes are, how one copes, how one is seen by others.

Transition priors about the environment: expectations about how situations unfold — what follows what, how likely harm is, and how long it lasts.

What matters at the deepest level — safety, connection, competence, understanding. They set the rewards that every task is evaluated against.

The specific model built for the situation at hand. Each inherits its structure from the priors and goals above it, so a bias higher up — overstating threat or understating control, as in anxiety — reshapes every task below.