Lucia Regolin and Giorgio Vallortigara

Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications
Volume 564

In its current use, cognition refers to all activities and processes dealing with the acquisition, storage, retrieval, and processing of information, and this seems to imply the involvement of a relatively complex nervous system. The term “relatively complex” usually refers to a direct comparison with the human or primate brain. And most research on comparative cognition and its neural bases has been restricted to a limited range of species within the vertebrate taxonomic groups. In the last 20 years, however, comparative research has been accumulating a huge bulk of scientific evidence for a wide range of processes in a variety of distantly related species, that seem to imply cognitive phenomena. Intriguing evidence of sophisticated behaviour has come from models which are extremely distant from primates, sometimes organisms with miniature brains. Great attention has attracted the (unexpected by many) evidence of cognitive behaviour in invertebrates and even in organisms classified outside of the Animal Kingdom. In 1980s Humberto Maturana suggested that: “Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition”, extending this statement to all organisms “with or without a nervous system” [1]. This was of course anticipated by the famous statement by Konrad Lorenz according to whom “Life itself is a process of acquiring knowledge” [2].

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See Special Issue: Rethinking Cognition: From Animal to Minimal

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