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 first 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.
These descriptions identify organisational functions only. They do not by themselves establish that the system or process is cognitive.
The purpose of this translation is not to weaken cognitive language but to clarify its biological referent. Cognitive terms may remain useful as comparative descriptions where the organisational function to which they refer is made explicit.
APS therefore distinguishes translation from attribution. Cognitive vocabulary may be translated into organisational terms where this clarifies the phenomenon under investigation; whether that phenomenon warrants cognitive attribution is a separate empirical and comparative question governed by the APS boundary for cognition.