Research has shown that some simple animals and even plants are capable of actively adapting to specific stimuli in their environment — which is taken as evidence of learning and remembering (in other words, cognition). For example, Monica Gagliano et al. (2016) worked with pea plants. There were two groups of ‘participants’. Both groups were exposed to wind but the experimental group was also exposed to light coming from the same direction as the wind. You are probably aware that plants grow away from wind but grow towards light.
Later both groups of plants were exposed only to wind. The original ‘wind only’ group grew away from the wind, whereas the ‘wind+light’ group grew towards the source of the wind because these plants had learned to associate wind with light. This demonstrated some sort of memory trace for past experience and also showed that associative learning (classical conditioning) occurs in plants. [You may be confused at this point because classical conditioning is a behaviourist concept rather than a cognitive concept. However, the processes underlying learning (for example, memory) are cognitive, even though the behaviourists argued that we can understand learning without exploring the underlying mental processes.]
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