{"id":68482,"date":"2024-03-25T17:44:52","date_gmt":"2024-03-25T17:44:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/rwanda\/all-news\/new-study-suggests-plants-can-learn-and-form-memories"},"modified":"2024-03-25T18:09:15","modified_gmt":"2024-03-25T18:09:15","slug":"new-study-suggests-plants-can-learn-and-form-memories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/rwanda\/all-news\/new-study-suggests-plants-can-learn-and-form-memories","title":{"rendered":"New Study Suggests Plants Can Learn and Form Memories"},"content":{"rendered":"

Africa-Press – Rwanda. <\/strong><\/span>The University of Western Australia has published a new study offering evidence that plants are conscious entities who can make links between events to learn about their environment. It was previously thought that only organisms with brains (i.e. most animals) were capable of doing this.<\/p>\n

The UWA\u2019s Centre for Evolutionary Biology collaborated with researchers from the Universities of Zurich and Oxford on the experiment, which was led by Associate Professor Monica Gagliano. Gagliano\u2019s team placed pea seedlings inside Y-shaped tubes with the two openings at the top.<\/p>\n

According to the study published in Scientific Reports, researchers would shine a light and blow a fan through one of the openings. Then, they would remove the light but continue to blow the fan, and the seedlings still moved toward the opening with the fan as though light was shining through it.<\/p>\n

The study reports this as evidence that the seedlings “learned” to associate the fan\u2019s breeze with light and so moved toward it.<\/p>\n

Gagliano compared this to Ivan Pavlov\u2019s famous experiments with dogs, where he proved the behavior of animals could be altered via conditioning.<\/p>\n

Gagliano\u2019s research suggests that a similar principle may apply to plants. “By challenging the way we currently view the agency of plants and their behaviors which have enabled them to flourish,” the study read, “the research opens up new and bigger ecological questions of how modifications to our environment will shape future plant communities.”<\/p>\n

A Toulouse University study in April of this year suggested that slime molds, single-celled pseudo-fungi, are capable of solving problems, navigating mazes, and anticipating patterns. Like plants, slime molds lack a brain and so were believed to be incapable of intelligent activity.<\/p>\n

The findings raise interesting questions about the nature of consciousness, intelligence, and agency within life forms previously thought to lack these qualities. If plants are conscious beings, where does that consciousness come from? Animals are conscious through their nervous systems, as their brain sends signals to the rest of their body to respond. Plants are known to move toward sunlight, but this process was thought to be the automated result of hormones produced within the plant\u2019s cells, according to the University of Munich. Yet the plants in the UWA study moved toward where they had previous evidence of a light source, even though that light was not present.<\/p>\n

“The learning paradigm characterised here opens new and exciting opportunities for examining numerous other forms of associative learning… in plants,” the study reads.<\/p>\n

For More News And Analysis About Rwanda<\/a> Follow Africa-Press<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Africa-Press – Rwanda. The University of Western Australia has published a new study offering evidence that plants are conscious entities who can make links between events to learn about their environment. It was previously thought that only organisms with brains (i.e. most animals) were capable of doing this. The UWA\u2019s Centre for Evolutionary Biology collaborated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":68481,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,31],"tags":[760,763,758],"class_list":["post-68482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all-news","category-miscellaneous","tag-africa-press","tag-africa-press-rwanda","tag-rwanda"],"yoast_head":"\nNew Study Suggests Plants Can Learn and Form Memories - Rwanda<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The University of Western Australia has published a new study offering evidence that plants are conscious entities who c ...\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/rwanda\/all-news\/new-study-suggests-plants-can-learn-and-form-memories\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"New Study Suggests Plants Can Learn and Form Memories\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The University of Western Australia has published a new study offering evidence that plants are conscious entities who c ...\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/rwanda\/all-news\/new-study-suggests-plants-can-learn-and-form-memories\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Rwanda\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2024-03-25T17:44:52+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2024-03-25T18:09:15+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/static.africa-press.net\/rwanda\/sites\/23\/2024\/03\/sm_1711377515.536357.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1023\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"682\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"cfeditoren\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"cfeditoren\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/rwanda\/all-news\/new-study-suggests-plants-can-learn-and-form-memories#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/rwanda\/all-news\/new-study-suggests-plants-can-learn-and-form-memories\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"cfeditoren\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/rwanda\/#\/schema\/person\/068c7ab4e9634ae78ec5d54ec46598bb\"},\"headline\":\"New Study Suggests Plants Can Learn and Form Memories\",\"datePublished\":\"2024-03-25T17:44:52+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2024-03-25T18:09:15+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/rwanda\/all-news\/new-study-suggests-plants-can-learn-and-form-memories\"},\"wordCount\":438,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/rwanda\/all-news\/new-study-suggests-plants-can-learn-and-form-memories#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/static.africa-press.net\/rwanda\/sites\/23\/2024\/03\/sm_1711377515.536357.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Africa Press\",\"Africa Press-Rwanda\",\"Rwanda\"],\"articleSection\":[\"all news\",\"Miscellaneous\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/rwanda\/all-news\/new-study-suggests-plants-can-learn-and-form-memories#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/rwanda\/all-news\/new-study-suggests-plants-can-learn-and-form-memories\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/rwanda\/all-news\/new-study-suggests-plants-can-learn-and-form-memories\",\"name\":\"New Study Suggests Plants Can Learn and Form Memories - 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