Is cognition at the root of plant behavior?

Information processing underlies the behavior of many species, including plants. However, there remains uncertainty about how plants integrate and use information, and whether this is analogous to animal cognition. We propose a conceptual and experimental framework, Plant Information Processing (PIP), that draws from advances in comparative psychology. Our framework challenges plants with increasingly complex processing tasks designed to reveal algorithmic patterns of information use. The PIP framework emphasizes not only behavioral outcomes, but also the associated errors, limitations, and biases, which reveal how information processing occurs in plants. This sequential, evidence-based strategy sidesteps semantic debates and facilitates meaningful cross-taxa comparisons that could advance the broader discipline of cognition.