For decades, scientists have assumed that learning, memory, and decision-making require a brain. However, growing evidence, including a recent study published in Cognitive Science, challenges that idea and suggests that complex information processing may not depend on neurons.
The study, led by William & Mary psychology professor Peter Vishton and his former student Paige Bartosh, suggests that plants may be able to count. Not in the human sense, but Mimosa pudica appear to be able to “keep track of the number of events in their environment,” said Vishton.
According to the researchers, this is the first evidence that plants can enumerate, meaning they can distinguish and track separate events.
Mimosa pudica, often called the shy plant or touch-me-not, has delicate, frond-like leaves that fold inward when touched or shaken. The leaves also close at night and reopen with daylight, a movement known as nyctinasty.
Experimental Setup and Plant Behavior Observations
In a humid tent inside a windowless room at William & Mary’s Integrated Science Center, the researchers exposed the plants to repeating cycles of light and darkness and monitored their responses.
“In the first phase of our experiment, we used a 24-hour cycle. On days one and two, the plants were exposed to 12 hours of darkness and 12 hours of light. On day three, the lights remained off,” Vishton explained.
After about five repetitions, the plants began showing increased movement during the “pre-dawn” period on days when light was expected, but not on the third day when darkness continued.
Evidence of Learning and Pattern Recognition
“This seems to suggest that the plants were able to ‘learn,’ for lack of a better word, this three-day cycle and shift their movement in response,” said Vishton.
Modeling this shift yielded a logarithmic curve, meaning the plants’ movement changed rapidly at first before gradually stabilizing into a consistent pattern.
“This is the same pattern we see all the time in animal learning,” said Vishton. “For example, if you are teaching a rat to perform a series of actions in a certain order, you would expect to see a period of time when they’re figuring out the sequence and then a gradual increase in their ability to predict the pattern.”
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