Biochemically plausible models of habituation for single-cell learning.

The ability to learn is typically attributed to animals with brains. However, the apparently simplest form of learning, habituation, in which a steadily decreasing response is exhibited to a repeated stimulus, is found not only in animals but also in single-cell organisms and individual mammalian cells. Habituation has been codified from studies in both invertebrate and vertebrate animals as having ten characteristic hallmarks, seven of which involve a single stimulus. Here, we show by mathematical modeling that simple molecular networks, based on plausible biochemistry with common motifs of negative feedback and incoherent feedforward, can robustly exhibit all single-stimulus hallmarks. The models reveal how the hallmarks arise from underlying properties of timescale separation and reversal behavior of memory variables, and they reconcile opposing views of frequency and intensity sensitivity expressed within the neuroscience and cognitive science traditions. Our results suggest that individual cells may exhibit habituation behavior as rich as that which has been codified in multi-cellular animals with central nervous systems and that the relative simplicity of the biomolecular level may enhance our understanding of the mechanisms of learning.

• Publication year

  2024

• Venue

  Current Biology

• Publication date

  2024-11-01

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.cub.2024.10.041PMID 39566497
• 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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