APS does not automatically attribute human psychological capacities to every system described using cognitive language. Instead, it translates familiar cognitive terms into descriptions of organisational activity grounded in viability-oriented agency.
Terms such as memory, learning, attention, goal, and decision-making often originate in discussions of human cognition, where they are associated with conscious awareness, subjective experience, or deliberate reasoning. APS does not assume that these human-specific characteristics accompany every biological process described using the same vocabulary.
Rather than asking whether a system possesses a human-like mental state, APS asks what organisational role a process performs within the maintenance of viability. In this context, memory refers to retained information, learning to persistent organisational modification, attention to the prioritisation of viability-relevant information, and decision-making to the differential selection among possible responses.
The purpose of this translation is not to weaken cognitive language but to clarify its biological meaning. Cognitive terms remain useful because they identify important organisational functions, yet their interpretation must remain appropriate to the system under investigation.
APS therefore interprets cognitive language through organisational function rather than psychological attribution.