ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2019
Memory inception and preservation in slime moulds: the quest for a common mechanism.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed.
- Salt affects structure, function and transcriptome in the giant cells of slime molds.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Minimal motifs for habituating systems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Collective intelligence: A unifying concept for integrating biology across scales and substrates.Communications biology · 2024Review
- Different Morphotypes of Physarum polycephalum as Models for Chemotaxis and Locomotion.Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2024Article
- Perspectives on Principles of Cellular Behavior from the Biophysics of Protists.Integrative and comparative biology · 2023Review
- Bioelectric networks: the cognitive glue enabling evolutionary scaling from physiology to mind.Animal cognition · 2023Review
- Darwin's agential materials: evolutionary implications of multiscale competency in developmental biology.Cellular and molecular life sciences : CMLS · 2023Review
- Behavioural changes in slime moulds over time.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Learning in the Single-Cell OrganismInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2023Article
- Relation between learning process and morphology of transport tube network in plasmodium ofFrontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2023Article
- The brain is not mental! coupling neuronal and immune cellular processing in human organisms.Frontiers in integrative neuroscience · 2023Article
- Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2022Article
- Complex population dynamics in a spatial microbial ecosystem with Physarum polycephalum.Bio Systems · 2021Article
- Adaptive behaviour and learning in slime moulds: the role of oscillations.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Associative Conditioning Is a Robust Systemic Behavior in Unicellular Organisms: An Interspecies Comparison.Frontiers in microbiology · 2021Article
- Fate of Duplicated Neural Structures.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Review
- Stress signalling in acellular slime moulds and its detection by conspecifics.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Ecological memory and relocation decisions in fungal mycelial networks: responses to quantity and location of new resources.The ISME journal · 2020Article
- Alanine tRNAs Translate Environment Into Behavior inFrontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2020Article
- The plant body as a network of semi-autonomous agents: a review.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Learning and memory are indisputably key features of animal success. Using information about past experiences is critical for optimal decision-making in a fluctuating environment. Those abilities are usually believed to be limited to organisms with a nervous system, precluding their existence in non-neural organisms. However, recent studies showed that the slime mould Physarum polycephalum, despite being unicellular, displays habituation, a simple form of learning. In this paper, we studied the possible substrate of both short- and long-term habituation in slime moulds. We habituated slime moulds to sodium, a known repellent, using a 6 day training and turned them into a dormant state named sclerotia. Those slime moulds were then revived and tested for habituation. We showed that information acquired during the training was preserved through the dormant stage as slime moulds still showed habituation after a one-month dormancy period. Chemical analyses indicated a continuous uptake of sodium during the process of habituation and showed that sodium was retained throughout the dormant stage. Lastly, we showed that memory inception via constrained absorption of sodium for 2 h elicited habituation. Our results suggest that slime moulds absorbed the repellent and used it as a 'circulating memory'. This article is part of the theme issue 'Liquid brains, solid brains: How distributed cognitive architectures process information'.
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