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Is cognition at the root of plant behavior?
Tanya T Shoot1, Brody Nagtegaal1, Ximena Nelson2
1Department of Biological Sciences, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
Trends in Ecology & Evolution
|December 2, 2025
Summary
Plants process information, similar to animals, but the mechanisms remain unclear. A new Plant Information Processing (PIP) framework uses complex tasks to study plant cognition and information use, enabling cross-species comparisons.
Area of Science:
- Plant Biology
- Cognitive Science
- Comparative Psychology
Background:
- Information processing is fundamental to the behavior of diverse species, including plants.
- The precise mechanisms by which plants integrate and utilize information, and their potential analogy to animal cognition, are not well understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To introduce the Plant Information Processing (PIP) framework, a novel conceptual and experimental approach.
- To investigate how plants process information by challenging them with complex tasks.
- To facilitate meaningful cross-taxa comparisons in the study of cognition.
Main Methods:
- Development of a conceptual and experimental framework (PIP) inspired by comparative psychology.
- Designing increasingly complex information processing tasks for plants.
- Analyzing behavioral outcomes, errors, limitations, and biases to understand information processing.
Main Results:
- The PIP framework provides a structured method to study plant information processing.
- The approach reveals algorithmic patterns in how plants use information.
- Emphasis on errors and biases offers insights into the limitations and mechanisms of plant information processing.
Conclusions:
- The PIP framework offers a robust strategy to investigate plant cognition.
- This approach moves beyond semantic debates to enable empirical, evidence-based comparisons across species.
- The study advances the broader discipline of cognition by including plant models.
Keywords:
animal cognitionbehavioral sciencescomparative psychologyplant biologyplant information processing (PIP)More Related Videos
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