ReviewInterface focus2017
Phylogenetic origins of biological cognition: convergent patterns in the early evolution of learning.
Review in Interface focus, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- Continual decision-making dynamics across biological organisms.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- The social origins of consciousness.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Associative conditioning in gene regulatory network models increases integrative causal emergence.Communications biology · 2025Article
- The "plant neurobiology" revolution.Plant signaling & behavior · 2024Review
- Rhesus monkeys show greater habituation to repeated computer-generated images than do orangutans.Behavioural processes · 2024Article
- Thoughts from the forest floor: a review of cognition in the slime mould Physarum polycephalum.Animal cognition · 2023Review
- On being a Hydra with, and without, a nervous system: what do neurons add?Animal cognition · 2023Review
- Genetic Disruption of System xc-Mediated Glutamate Release from Astrocytes Increases Negative-Outcome Behaviors While Preserving Basic Brain Function in Rat.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Associative learning in the cnidarianProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Minding the gut: extending embodied cognition and perception to the gut complex.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
- Differential MC5R loss in whales and manatees reveals convergent evolution to the marine environment.Development genes and evolution · 2022Article
- Evolution of Brains and Computers: The Roads Not Taken.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Towards the Idea of Molecular Brains.International journal of molecular sciences · 2021Review
- Bioluminescence and Photoreception in Unicellular Organisms: Light-Signalling in a Bio-Communication Perspective.International journal of molecular sciences · 2021Review
- Debunking a myth: plant consciousness.Protoplasma · 2021Review
- Adaptive behaviour and learning in slime moulds: the role of oscillations.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- The Relevance of Metaphysics to Behavior Analysis.Perspectives on behavior science · 2021Article
- Anaesthetics and plants: from sensory systems to cognition-based adaptive behaviour.Protoplasma · 2021Article
- Transcriptional memories mediate the plasticity of cold stress responses to enable morphological acclimation in Brachypodium distachyon.The New phytologist · 2021Article
- Memory inception and preservation in slime moulds: the quest for a common mechanism.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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1 author.
Funding
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Abstract
Various forms of elementary learning have recently been discovered in organisms lacking a nervous system, such as protists, fungi and plants. This finding has fundamental implications for how we view the role of convergent evolution in biological cognition. In this article, I first review the evidence for basic forms of learning in aneural organisms, focusing particularly on habituation and classical conditioning and considering the plausibility for convergent evolution of these capacities. Next, I examine the possible role of convergent evolution regarding these basic learning abilities during the early evolution of nervous systems. The evolution of nervous systems set the stage for at least two major events relevant to convergent evolution that are central to biological cognition: (i) nervous systems evolved, perhaps more than once, because of strong selection pressures for sustaining sensorimotor strategies in increasingly larger multicellular organisms and (ii) associative learning was a subsequent adaptation that evolved multiple times within the neuralia. Although convergent evolution of basic forms of learning among distantly related organisms such as protists, plants and neuralia is highly plausible, more research is needed to verify whether these forms of learning within the neuralia arose through convergent or parallel evolution.
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Registered trials
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.