General Informational Flow (GIF)

General Informational Flow (GIF) DOI is the continuous field of environmental informational variation within which organisms and intelligent systems operate, and from which cognitive systems detect informational events, structure them into tasks, and select appropriate behavior change (B1→B2) DOI under the viability constraints of Energy, Safety, and Reproduction (ESR) DOI. Within the Five Task Model DOI, General Informational Flow is the primary informational field from which adaptive cognition extracts relevant signals and organizes them into recurrent task domains. In this framework, cognition does not respond to the environment as an undifferentiated whole, but to informational variation that becomes meaningful for the regulation of behavior in relation to ESR. General Informational Flow becomes empirically visible through behavior change, since the transition from one behavioral state to another marks the point at which informational variation has been recognized, interpreted, and acted upon. This observational logic is applied in the Comparative Dataset of Informational Tasks (1530 Species) DOI, where behavior change serves as the primary comparative handle for identifying recurrent informational task domains across biological life. Within the Periodic Table of Cognition DOI, General Informational Flow functions as the common environmental source from which different species extract different classes of meaningful variation according to their cognitive-behavioral architecture. In this sense, GIF is the universal informational medium, while the Five Task Model and the Periodic Table of Cognition describe how that medium is differentially recognized, structured, and regulated across species and systems.