ArticleScientific reports2016
Learning by Association in Plants.
Article in Scientific reports, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 54 papers.
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Who cites it
54 citing papers in PubMed.
- Learning in plants: A conceptual and experimental primer.Learning & behavior · 2026Article
- Plant Behaviour, Adaptive Plasticity and Evolution: Reassessing the Debate on Plant Intelligence.Biology · 2026Review
- Developing a sinusoidal-polynomial fitting model for deriving the structural and biochemical circadian rhythms for different parts of Birch from hyperspectral LiDAR data.Plant methods · 2026Article
- Growth Inhibition and Allelopathy Enhancement ofPlants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Short-term transcriptional memory and association-forming ability of tomato plants in response to ultrasound and drought stress stimuli.Plant signaling & behavior · 2025Article
- Trainable computation in molecular networks.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Can Mimosa pudica Plants Enumerate Light Exposure Events?Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Don't jump the gun quite yet: aiming for the true target in plant neurobiology research.Protoplasma · 2025Article
- A litmus test for plant consciousness: Pattern-Temporal Synergy in a relation-first ontology.Communicative & integrative biology · 2025Article
- The "plant neurobiology" revolution.Plant signaling & behavior · 2024Review
- Vegetal memory through the lens of transcriptomic changes - recent progress and future practical prospects for exploiting plant transcriptional memory.Plant signaling & behavior · 2024Review
- Extending cognition: a vegetal rejoinder to extensionless thought and to extended cognition.Plant signaling & behavior · 2024Article
- Common bean under different water availability reveals classifiable stimuli-specific signatures in plant electrome.Plant signaling & behavior · 2024Article
- A library of electrophysiological responses in plants - a model of transversal education and open science.Plant signaling & behavior · 2024Article
- Ornstein-Uhlenbeck Adaptation as a Mechanism for Learning in Brains and Machines.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Biofeedback-Based Closed-Loop Phytoactuation in Vertical Farming and Controlled-Environment Agriculture.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Can Plants Perceive Human Gestures? Using AI to Track Eurythmic Human-Plant Interaction.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Evaluation of secondary sexual dimorphism of the dioecious Amaranthus palmeri under abiotic stress.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- The Electrome of a Parasitic Plant in a Putative State of Attention Increases the Energy of Low Band Frequency Waves: A Comparative Study with Neural Systems.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Rethinking economic theories of plant water use.Journal of biosciences · 2023Article
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5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In complex and ever-changing environments, resources such as food are often scarce and unevenly distributed in space and time. Therefore, utilizing external cues to locate and remember high-quality sources allows more efficient foraging, thus increasing chances for survival. Associations between environmental cues and food are readily formed because of the tangible benefits they confer. While examples of the key role they play in shaping foraging behaviours are widespread in the animal world, the possibility that plants are also able to acquire learned associations to guide their foraging behaviour has never been demonstrated. Here we show that this type of learning occurs in the garden pea, Pisum sativum. By using a Y-maze task, we show that the position of a neutral cue, predicting the location of a light source, affected the direction of plant growth. This learned behaviour prevailed over innate phototropism. Notably, learning was successful only when it occurred during the subjective day, suggesting that behavioural performance is regulated by metabolic demands. Our results show that associative learning is an essential component of plant behaviour. We conclude that associative learning represents a universal adaptive mechanism shared by both animals and plants.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.