Thoughts from the forest floor: a review of cognition in the slime mould Physarum polycephalum

Sensing, communication, navigation, decision-making, memory and learning are key components in a standard cognitive tool-kit that enhance an animal’s ability to successfully survive and reproduce. However, these tools are not only useful for, or accessible to, animals—they evolved long ago in simpler organisms using mechanisms which may be either unique or widely conserved across diverse taxa. In this article, I review the recent research that demonstrates these key cognitive abilities in the plasmodial slime mould Physarum polycephalum , which has emerged as a model for non-animal cognition. I discuss the benefits and limitations of comparisons drawn between neural and non-neural systems, and the implications of common mechanisms across wide taxonomic divisions. I conclude by discussing future avenues of research that will draw the most benefit from a closer integration of Physarum and animal cognition research.

• Publication year

  2023

• Venue

  Animal Cognition

• Publication date

  2023-05-11

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1007/s10071-023-01782-1PMID 37166523PMCID 10770251
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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