A project team led by Patrick McGivern at the University of Wollongong aims to deepen understanding of the evolution of cognition in non-neural entities by exploring the questions through the  "Major Transitions in the Evolution of Cognition" framework developed by Barron, Halina and Klein (2023). 

The “Transitions” framework makes the case that rather than a gradual increase in cognitive complexity, major transitions marked by big changes in how organisms process information make it possible for organisms to develop new abilities. The framework is based around fundamental changes in neural architecture that correspond to developments in cognitive capacities. McGivern’s team aims to explore how the “Transitions” framework might be extended to apply to cognitive capacities in non-neural systems.

Such a framework would be crucial for understanding the evolutionary history of intelligent systems, since non-neural creatures are more ancient than neural ones.

To date, discussions of cognition in non-neural creatures have been somewhat haphazard, in part because the identification of cognitive behavior is itself contentious. The extended “Transitions” framework could provide important guidance for this work, since the identification of non-neural equivalents of transitional structures could contribute to the motivation for recognizing the associated behaviors in non-neural creatures as cognitive.