Cognition
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Characteristics
Katherine Hayles:
"Identifying five criteria that a living organism’s behavior must display to be considered cognitive: sensing, interpreting, responding flexibly, anticipating, and learning (SIRAL).
- Sensing means simply that the organism can receive information from the environment.
- The second requirement, interpreting, implies that much cognitive processing occurs at the level of sensory perception; for conscious organisms, this happens well before conscious awareness kicks in.
- Response, the third criterion, denotes a behavior evoked by an environmental stimulus. For humans, this may entail the use of (symbolic) language (you may decide to write me an email after reading this paragraph, for example). For nonhuman organisms, biosemiotics (the science of signs used by nonhuman biological organisms) has developed an understanding of nonhuman behaviors as signs that function as representations.
- Anticipation, the fourth requirement, is crucial to an organism’s survival: preparation for the future pays off handsomely by enabling organisms to deal with environmental fluctuations, looming predations, and the orderly progression of days and seasons. Organisms with brains clearly demonstrate anticipatory behaviors.
- Learning, the fifth requirement, means that the organism can change its behaviors as a result of previous experiences."