Understanding what people instinctively feel — not just what they say.
Cognitif Group has developed Semantic Bathymetry™, a privacy-preserving platform for measuring latent associative orientation at population scale through the proprietary Petalyx™ capture system.
Affective AI — the problem
People answer as they wish to be seen.
Traditional surveys measure declared opinion — and social desirability bias means people answer as the person they would like to be, not as they instinctively feel. Implicit tests reach the instinct, but require laboratory conditions and cannot scale. And any system that collects individual-level data carries consent and governance obligations many organisations cannot absorb.
Semantic Bathymetry™ captures latent associative orientation at population scale — without recording personally-identifiable data.
The solution
The system
Instinct, measured.
Radial capture
Petalyx™ presents rapid word-association tasks. For each prompt word, users choose from five response candidates arranged radially, or select ‘None of the Above’ — the chosen response and the non-chosen options are both informative.
Noise, normalised
Response times are normalised against individual motor speed, within-session fatigue, time-of-day variation, and demographic baseline — designed to outperform raw reaction-time data and self-report instruments.
Aversion, captured
Captures both positive affect and systematic aversion — what a population approaches carries no more weight than what it consistently avoids.
Destroyed at source
All individual session data is destroyed on the user's device before any transmission. Only aggregate coordinate scores are transmitted and stored.
Truth, at scale
Genuine instinctive orientation, deployable at population scale without laboratory conditions. The stored dataset is designed to contain no personal data within the meaning of UK GDPR Recital 26.
See the whole picture in a minute.
From a split-second choice to a topographical map of population sentiment — the plain-English introduction takes sixty seconds.