  Recent comprehensive overview of 40 years of research in cognitive
architectures, (Kotseruba and Tsotsos 2020), evaluates modelling of the core
cognitive abilities in humans, but only marginally addresses biologically
plausible approaches based on natural computation. This mini review presents a
set of perspectives and approaches which have shaped the development of
biologically inspired computational models in the recent past that can lead to
the development of biologically more realistic cognitive architectures. For
describing continuum of natural cognitive architectures, from basal cellular to
human-level cognition, we use evolutionary info-computational framework, where
natural/ physical/ morphological computation leads to evolution of increasingly
complex cognitive systems. Forty years ago, when the first cognitive
architectures have been proposed, understanding of cognition, embodiment and
evolution was different. So was the state of the art of information physics,
bioinformatics, information chemistry, computational neuroscience, complexity
theory, self-organization, theory of evolution, information and computation.
Novel developments support a constructive interdisciplinary framework for
cognitive architectures in the context of computing nature, where interactions
between constituents at different levels of organization lead to
complexification of agency and increased cognitive capacities. We identify
several important research questions for further investigation that can
increase understanding of cognition in nature and inspire new developments of
cognitive technologies. Recently, basal cell cognition attracted a lot of
interest for its possible applications in medicine, new computing technologies,
as well as micro- and nanorobotics.
