APS does not attribute cognition to plants because plants resemble humans or animals.
Nor does APS deny cognition because plants lack brains, nervous systems, or conscious awareness.
The relevant question is organisational rather than anatomical.
Biological Agency, Biological Evaluation, Significance, and Integration provide pre-cognitive explanatory dependencies within APS. Their presence is therefore relevant to the investigation of cognition but does not by itself establish that a plant, process, or behaviour is cognitive.
Within APS, cognition is the organisation of biological significance across time. Biological agency becomes cognitive when integrated biological significance modulates activity across a temporal field of viability-relevant possibilities in ways not exhausted by immediate or fixed regulation.
Plant cognition therefore neither depends upon neural structures nor follows merely from the presence of viability-oriented regulation, biological significance, memory-like effects, anticipation, adaptive flexibility, or other capacities sometimes described using cognitive language.
APS rejects anthropomorphic inference without making neural absence decisive in the opposite direction. The relevant question is whether a specified plant phenomenon exhibits explanatory dependencies warranting cognitive attribution when compared with the strongest adequate non-cognitive explanation of that same phenomenon.