Beyond neurocentrism: situating cognition within the metabolic demands of the whole organism

Abstract We reorient Haueis and Colaço’s metabolic framework of cognitive modeling by drawing on neuroscientific evidence from animal motor control, reinforcement learning, and decision-making to show that cognition emerged to serve the metabolic demands of the whole organism, rather than those of the brain alone. We also illustrate the generative value of our reframing to model cognition in artificial systems.