{"pk":50122,"title":"The Role of Plant Gestalt in Plant Embodied Cognition","subtitle":null,"abstract":"I propose that plant cognition is better understood by focusing on the overall form and structure of a plant that continuously unfolds via growth—its gestalt—rather than discrete movements of individual parts, such as roots, stems, or leaves. I conceptualize plant gestalt as a self regulating, dynamic, fractal structure that modulates information flow and simultaneously channels resources across scales, thereby coordinating perception-action within the plant and with other organisms. By integrating concepts like pink noise and self organized criticality, I link the statistical signatures of optimal coupling to the physical architecture of living plants. This structural lens reframes plant cognition: rather than being merely distributed beyond a nervous system, form follows function and is materially enacted by the ever changing topology of plant bodies. Recognizing gestalt growth as a cognitive substrate opens new research avenues into how plants sense, decide, and adapt, with the possibility of analyzing it as records of past decisions.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Biology; Complex systems; Distributed cognition; Embodied Cognition"}],"section":"Abstracts with Poster Presentation (accepted as Abstracts)","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7m6300jv","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Anna","middle_name":"","last_name":"Finke","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Murcia","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T13:00:00-05:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/50122/galley/38084/download/"}]}