ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2017
Predicting green: really radical (plant) predictive processing.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
37 citing papers in PubMed.
- Active inference as a model of collision avoidance behavior in human drivers.Nature communications · 2026Article
- From Phytochemicals to Physiology: The Metabolic and Redox Effects of Botanical Extracts on Crops.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Life and experience as irreducible dimensions of nature.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Beyond representations: from active inference to active interference.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- 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
- Forced Friends: Why the Free Energy Principle Is Not the New Hamilton's Principle.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Future medicine: from molecular pathways to the collective intelligence of the body.Trends in molecular medicine · 2023Review
- There's Plenty of Room Right Here: Biological Systems as Evolved, Overloaded, Multi-Scale Machines.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- From dark to darkness, negative phototropism influences the support-tree location of the massive woody climberPlant signaling & behavior · 2022Article
- Applying the Free Energy Principle to Complex Adaptive Systems.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- How particular is the physics of the free energy principle?Physics of life reviews · 2022Review
- Synchronous Generative Development amidst Situated Entropy.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2022Article
- How Psychedelic-Assisted Treatment Works in the Bayesian Brain.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Article
- Our sisters the plants? notes from phylogenetics and botany on plant kinship blindness.Plant signaling & behavior · 2021Article
- Nonhuman rationality: a predictive coding perspective.Cognitive processing · 2021Article
- Debunking a myth: plant consciousness.Protoplasma · 2021Review
- Multiscale Free Energy Analysis of Human Ecosystem Engineering.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
In this article we account for the way plants respond to salient features of their environment under the free-energy principle for biological systems. Biological self-organization amounts to the minimization of surprise over time. We posit that any self-organizing system must embody a generative model whose predictions ensure that (expected) free energy is minimized through action. Plants respond in a fast, and yet coordinated manner, to environmental contingencies. They pro-actively sample their local environment to elicit information with an adaptive value. Our main thesis is that plant behaviour takes place by way of a process (active inference) that predicts the environmental sources of sensory stimulation. This principle, we argue, endows plants with a form of perception that underwrites purposeful, anticipatory behaviour. The aim of the article is to assess the prospects of a radical predictive processing story that would follow naturally from the free-energy principle for biological systems; an approach that may ultimately bear upon our understanding of life and cognition more broadly.
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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.