Finding the Signal Within the Noise: What Information Warriors Need to Know About Human Pattern Recognition.
•January 28, 2026
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Why It Matters
Understanding these cognitive dynamics lets analysts spot influence campaigns earlier and design more effective counter‑propaganda strategies, protecting democratic discourse.
Key Takeaways
- •Pattern recognition exploits cultural myths for rapid persuasion
- •Regularity, form, order shape coherent propaganda narratives
- •Micro‑meso‑macro layers amplify emotional and ideological impact
- •False positives expose botnets; false negatives delay detection
- •Memory‑linked emotions lock narratives, resisting correction
Pulse Analysis
Human pattern recognition is a double‑edged sword in modern information warfare. When adversaries embed messages within familiar cultural myths—such as Russia’s World‑War‑II hero narrative—they trigger automatic mental shortcuts that prioritize coherence over factual accuracy. This cognitive bias, often described as apophenia, allows a simple frame to become a powerful signal, overwhelming audiences with a flood of repetitive content that feels intuitively true. Recognizing the role of regularity, form, and order helps analysts dissect why certain memes or slogans gain traction while others fade.
Beyond the psychological layer, pattern theory provides a structural lens for dissecting campaigns across three scales. Micro‑patterns arise from individual emotional triggers, meso‑patterns emerge as shared hashtags or community clusters, and macro‑patterns crystallize into overarching ideological worldviews. By mapping these layers, information warriors can pinpoint where a narrative is most vulnerable—disrupting micro‑level emotional hooks, fragmenting meso‑level network clusters, or challenging macro‑level ideological frames. This multi‑tiered approach also mitigates false‑positive pitfalls, where bots mistakenly amplify unrelated spikes, and reduces false‑negative blind spots that let covert coordination slip past detection tools.
For practitioners, integrating cognitive insights with algorithmic analytics yields a more resilient defense. Machine learning excels at spotting anomalous posting rhythms, yet human analysts must interpret the meaning behind those rhythms, assessing whether they signal genuine grassroots sentiment or a manufactured narrative. Counter‑propaganda efforts should therefore blend data‑driven pattern detection with narrative‑level interventions—reframing stories, injecting alternative emotional cues, and breaking the order that sustains hostile messages. Mastering this synergy equips organizations to turn the signal‑to‑noise challenge into a strategic advantage, preserving the integrity of public discourse in an era of relentless information assault.
Finding the Signal within the Noise: What Information Warriors Need to Know About Human Pattern Recognition.
Editor’s Note: this article is being republished with the permission of Small Wars Journal as part of a republishing arrangement between IWI and SWJ. The original article was published on 12.18.2025 and is available here.
In 2022, Russian state media launched a coordinated narrative campaign portraying Ukraine’s government as “neo-Nazi” and its citizens as victims of Western manipulation. The “neo-Nazi” narrative worked unusually well because it activated deep cultural memories from Russia’s World War II mythology, where defeating fascism is central to national identity. This signal’s Russia tried to construct was simple but powerful: Russia is morally righteous, Ukraine is inherently dangerous, and military action is not just justified but necessary. Within days, thousands of automated social-media accounts began repeating the same story frame across Telegram, VKontakte, Twitter, and YouTube. The repetition created a sense of coherence that transcended evidence. Users were not persuaded by facts. They were reassured by familiar patterns, heroes, villains, and moral redemption, that felt intuitively true. Analysts at RAND later described this “firehose of falsehood” approach as a system that overwhelms critical thinking through volume and repetition rather than logic. These operations succeed because they weaponize the way human beings naturally seek order in chaos. Cognitive research shows that when people face missing or confusing information, the brain automatically fills in the blanks to create a complete picture. If part of an image, story, or message is unclear, the mind supplies the missing detail from memory or expectation to make it feel whole. This process reduces uncertainty and creates a sense of order, even when the available data are incomplete or misleading. This bias toward pattern completion makes intuitive judgments feel accurate even when they are wrong. When adversaries shape those patterns, they shape belief.
Information warriors often equate pattern recognition with algorithmic detection, how machines identify recurring data sequences. Yet meaning itself is patterned. Humans interpret the world through nested and evolving configurations of memory, emotion, and story. Propaganda can exploit these interpretive patterns by mirroring cultural myths and moral schemas, turning recognition into persuasion. Understanding this patterned battlespace is now central to information warfare. Machines can detect repeated hashtags, posting cycles, or network clusters, but only humans can interpret what those patterns mean, whether a spike in activity signals fear, outrage, solidarity, or coordinated manipulation.
What is a Pattern?
According to pattern theory, a pattern is a recurring configuration of relationships among elements, perceptual, cognitive, emotional, or symbolic, that allows humans to interpret, predict, and attribute meaning to experience. Patterns exist outside the mind in the recurring structures of the world itself. They appear in how social networks organize influence, how economies fluctuate, how military units coordinate, and how communication flows across platforms. On social media, for example, a few influencers drive most of the traffic while thousands of smaller accounts echo their content. This power-law structure repeats across almost every platform. More importantly, patterns exist within the mind, where they serve as the internal frameworks that give meaning to experience. Pattern theory holds that humans interpret the world by matching new information to familiar mental structures built from memory, emotion, and prior understanding. The mind is constantly sorting, comparing and simplifying incoming signals, turning raw data into recognizable forms that feel coherent. When a message matches a story someone already believes or a symbol they already trust, it feels true without being verified. These inner patterns give strength to outer messages. Information persuades only when it connects to the ways people already understand the world. For example, an external pattern such as a repeated claim that “outsiders are threatening the nation” only becomes convincing if it matches an internal pattern. Like a long-held fear of foreign betrayal or a cultural story about past invasions. When the external message fits the internal memory, it feels true even without evidence. Information persuades only when it connects to the ways people already understand the world.
Pattern theory holds that a pattern is built on three basic ideas: regularity, form, and order. Regularity means things happen in repeating ways that can be tracked or predicted. In the information space, regularity shows up as posting schedules, meme cycles, or spikes in coordinated messages before key events like elections or protests. These repeating actions are not random; they create rhythm and tempo in communication. Analysts who notice them can spot influence operations early, even before the content itself is recognized as propaganda. Form and order describe how those regular actions take shape and connect. Form is the perceived structure or configuration of a thing. For example slogans, hashtags, or video styles that make an information campaign recognizable by giving it a shape. Order is how the a perceivable thing is arranged and sequenced, which can create effect a desired effect. It decides what message leads, what symbols repeat, and how emotional cues are layered to hold attention. Order determines what messages lead, which symbols repeat, and how emotional triggers are layered to guide attention. In practice, form gives repetition a shape, and order gives that shape direction. When all three elements work together, they build coherence and trust in a narrative. When order breaks down, messages lose clarity and audiences drift. Understanding this relationship helps information warriors see how meaning is structured, repeated, and reinforced across the information battlespace.
False Positives and False Negatives
Human’s experience false positive errors in patterns recognition with a concept knows as pareidolia. People seeing meaningful shapes or patterns in their minds but which do not exist in external reality. During the Syrian civil war, social media users repeatedly claimed to see hidden symbols in satellite images and cloud formations. For instance, the outline of religious icons, flags, or faces, interpreting them as divine signs favoring one side. A similar problem occurs at the state and botnet level. During the 2016 U.S. election cycle, several Russian-linked bot networks misread unrelated spikes in online chatter as emerging “grassroots movements” and amplified them aggressively, assuming they were organic flashpoints. In reality, many of these spikes came from automated spam or unrelated viral entertainment content. This false-positive pattern detection created an operational vulnerability: botnets exposed themselves by over-engaging with irrelevant material, making their coordination patterns easier for researchers to detect and remove. Misinterpreting noise as signal can therefore weaken the very operations designed to manipulate public perception. This bias reflects an exploitable heuristic of predictively matching sensory input to familiar forms, even with limited data. Humans also experience the opposite error, a false negative, when they fail to recognize patterns that actually exist. In information warfare, this occurs when analysts overlook coordinated behavior or repeating narrative structures because they appear fragmented or coincidental. Missing these real patterns can delay detection of influence campaigns or coordinated inauthentic activity.
Human Memory and Pattern Recognition
Pattern theory holds that patterns arise from the aggregation of memory. Every time people process new information, they compare it with similar experiences stored in memory. The brain keeps not only facts but the relationships between events, emotions, and outcomes, essentially the pattern itself. Emotion plays a central role in this process because emotional arousal strengthens memory encoding and retrieval, making emotionally charged patterns more vivid and durable**.** These remembered connections create shortcuts for understanding: a phrase, color, or symbol can instantly recall an entire story. Memory patterns can become the bridge between past and present. When propaganda reuses familiar cues, old wartime songs, national heroes, or historical grievances, it awakens emotional memory. The message feels authentic because it matches what the audience already remembers as meaningful. This gives adversaries a major operational advantage because messages tied to emotional memory bypass analytic scrutiny, spread faster through shared identity groups, and are far more resistant to later correction.
Memory also shapes how patterns persist and spread. Once people internalize a narrative pattern, a story that explains who is right, who is wrong, and why, it becomes the mental template through which new information is judged. Every future event is compared against that stored storyline. Details that fit the narrative are remembered and reinforced; those that contradict it are dismissed or forgotten. This selective recall keeps the pattern stable and emotionally satisfying. Propaganda relies on this mechanism, because repeating stories that align with existing memory structures—such as betrayal by outsiders, national rebirth, or heroic sacrifice—make old emotions feel current again. The result is continuity. Memory anchors propaganda in familiar experiences—old victories, past betrayals, or shared suffering—while narrative carries those emotions forward through new events. A speech recalling a fallen hero, a holiday celebrating survival, or a meme repeating a national grievance all keep the past emotionally active. Together they form a self-sustaining cycle each retelling reinforces the feeling and shapes how new information is judged. Remembered emotion guides interpretation, and new stories refresh the memory, creating a self-sustaining cycle that keeps belief in motion.
Emotion and memory do more than preserve patterns, they guide attention to which patterns are seen at all. Prior emotional experience shapes what the brain treats as significant, drawing focus to cues linked with past reward or threat.
A familiar image of a flag, a wounded child, or a defiant leader captures attention faster and holds it longer than neutral information. Once attention locks onto an emotionally charged signal, it receives deeper cognitive processing, increasing the chance it will be stored as long-term memory. Empirical evidence shows that emotional arousal strengthens both attention and memory consolidation, allowing emotional signals to exert stronger influence than their factual content alone. Over time, attention becomes patterned. People keep noticing the same emotional cues, which strengthen the mental links that shape how they see new information. In digital warfare, this reflex is exploited by pairing strong emotions with key messages so they are more likely to be seen, believed, and remembered.
Micro, Meso and Macro Patterns
Patterns develop across three interconnected levels, micro, meso, and macro, that build on one another. Each level adds structure and stability to the one beneath it. Micro-patterns are the smallest building blocks of meaning. They form inside individual cognition through repeated associations between ideas, emotions, and images. Each person develops micro-patterns that shape how they interpret new information. For instance, linking authority with control, religion with morality, or the flag with loyalty. However, micro-patterns are usually fleeting and often fail to be transformed into a memory. In the information domain, micro-patterns appear as reflexive reactions: anger at a perceived insult to one’s group, sympathy for an image of suffering civilians, or trust in a message that uses a familiar tone or accent. These reactions are fast, emotional, and largely automatic. They explain why a single tweet, meme, or photo can instantly feel “right” to one person and “false” to another.
Meso-patterns emerge when many people share and reinforce the same micro-patterns, creating collective habits of interpretation. Thus, meso-patterns are more likely to be stored in human memory if a person recognizes it as such. They are visible in networks, hashtags, and discourse communities that organize around common moral cues or narratives. For example, during Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, hashtags #DenazifyUkraine and #SaveDonbasPeople synchronized individual outrage into a shared sense of mission. Coordinated images of liberation, brotherhood, and victimhood formed a recognizable structure that unified audiences who never met. Macro-patterns operate above this layer and are stored in the memory because people cognitively elaborate on them. They are also shared with other people, allowing one to externalize them from one’s individual thought to collectively shared ideas. They are the overarching ideological and civilizational frameworks—such as Russia’s “defense of the motherland” or China’s “community of shared destiny”—that connect many meso-patterns into a single worldview. Together, these three levels are arrayed along a continuum of development: micro-patterns drive emotion, meso-patterns organize identity, and macro-patterns shape perception of truth and legitimacy.
Together, these levels form an escalation pathway that adversaries can intentionally drive. Micro-patterns create fast emotional reactions that prime audiences. Meso-patterns turn those reactions into shared identity and group alignment. Macro-patterns elevate the shared identity into a full ideological frame that organizes how people interpret events, choose sides, and justify action. Adversaries often push patterns up this scale on purpose: they seed emotional triggers at the micro-level, amplify them through networks to form meso-level clusters, and then attach those clusters to a larger civilizational or moral narrative. Strategically, each level serves a different function, micro-patterns shape feeling, meso-patterns shape belonging, and macro-patterns shape belief. Understanding how these layers escalate helps analysts see where a campaign currently sits, what it aims to become, and where it is most vulnerable to disruption.
Sharing Patterns
People share meaning, intentionally or unintentionally, by projecting their internal patterns into the external world through communication. Each time someone encounters a signal that feels familiar, like a story frame, slogan, or image, it becomes a pattern instance. People recognize these signals as being related to an existing memory pattern. When people recreate or imitate these signals in a way that evokes a response from others, they produce pattern expressions. Intentional performances of a known structure, such as repeating a meme, slogan, or narrative format. Pattern representations go a step further: they are crafted messages designed to communicate the underlying structure and meaning of a pattern itself. They help others see more than the surface symbol by revealing its emotional or moral meaning. Creating clear pattern expressions takes careful thought and an understanding of how the audience will interpret them. A protest chant, recruitment video, or state documentary works this way. In information warfare, these repeated forms spread shared emotions and moral themes across audiences, turning individual recognition into collective belief.
Pattern Systems and their Language
When many pattern expressions and representations start to interact, they form larger structures of meaning. Over time, these individual signals organize into pattern systems, which are a collection of networked and related pattern representations that belong to a single domain that follow shared rules and recognizable styles. This marks the shift from spontaneous expression to organized communication. What starts as people repeating familiar symbols grows into a structured language that shapes belief and directs action. Understanding this evolution from single pattern to system helps explain how isolated messages turn into sustained information campaigns. For example, military communication, religious rhetoric, and online activism each use their own pattern systems.
Pattern language has two main parts: grammar and syntax. Grammar defines the rules for combining pattern representations; what belongs, what conflicts, and what sequence creates coherence. Syntax defines the idiomatic or stylistic ways patterns are used and combined to fit the domain’s norms. The language must be coherent and standardized so that its messages are clear, repeatable, and mutually reinforcing The first is structure, which creates a description of the pattern. Second is application, which explains how the pattern creates a solution to a particular problem. Next are the establishment of relationships between pattern elements. Authority is the principle that establishes which patterns are recognized as valid within a pattern system. Invariance defines what remains constant within a pattern system, even as its surface details change. Finally density refers to the concentration and interconnection of patterns within a system. Together, these principles ensure that every message within the system connects to a larger order of meaning. Thus, a pattern language gives users a consistent way to express meaning so that others inside the system can instantly recognize and respond to it.
Summing Up through an Example
Taken together, these concepts show how a full information operation is built from the ground up. A campaign begins with micro-patterns. Emotional hooks are built from memory cues designed for a specific target audience. These micro-patterns appear as videos, images, or slogans that trigger familiar feelings. Operators then create pattern expressions and representations that repeat the same structure for others to see. Repetition creates regularity, posting schedules, meme cycles, and predictable rhythms. They shape form through visual style and order by deciding which messages lead and which repeat, so everything fits together. These pieces combine into a pattern system guided by a shared pattern language, its grammar, style, and tone. Employing the principles of authority, invariance, and density makes the pattern credible and stable. The system runs on memory and emotion: emotional cues make messages stick, attention focuses on them, and narrative memory filters new information through the old story.
A concrete example makes this plain. In the 2022 Russian narrative campaign, operators seeded short video clips and images (pattern instances) that echoed as micropatterns of older stories about threats against Russia. They created regularity by amplifying those messages on a predictable cycle across hubs and botnets. They used consistent visual templates and slogans (form) and scripted a sequence creating shock, grievance, call to unity (order). Hashtags and influencer scripts produced meso-level clusters of sharing and identity formation. State media and allied influencers created macro patterns by tying these clusters into a broader civilizational frame such as the defense of homeland and Russian citizen’s moral duty that stayed invariant even as imagery changed. The system displayed density: history, religion, victim narratives, and military symbolism cross-linked to support the same conclusion. This creates a feedback loop with the earlier principles, regularity, form, and order, because the same clues that reveal a pattern system at the start also help analysts track how it evolves and anticipate its next move. Conclusion By identifying these patterned signals before the narrative fully matures, analysts gain the ability to disrupt or redirect the operation, demonstrating why mastery of pattern recognition is essential for modern information warfare.
Information warfare is ultimately a contest over pattern control. Every actor in the information space competes to define what feels coherent, familiar, and true. Pattern theory shows that belief does not begin with facts but with recognizable structures of memory, emotion, and story. The most effective operations build authority, maintain invariance, and increase density until their message feels inevitable. Defenders must therefore think in patterns, not posts. Understanding how micro-patterns anchor emotion, how meso-patterns build identity, and how macro-patterns organize ideology allows analysts to see the architecture behind persuasion. The advantage goes to the side that can read these systems first, disrupt their rhythm, and replace them with coherent alternatives that align truth with emotional and cultural meaning. In the cognitive domain, mastery of patterns is mastery of perception—and perception decides every war.
Douglas S. Wilbur, Ph.D. is a former US Army information operations officer with four deployments. After the military, he earned his Ph.D. in strategic communication from the University of Missouri School of Journalism. His research specialty is in propaganda and information warfare.
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