Recommendable! This is a long overview article! Will the long held dogma that unicellular organisms are unable to learn fall?
"The question of whether single cells can learn led to much debate in the early 20th century. The view prevailed that they were capable of non-associative learning but not of associative learning, such as Pavlovian conditioning. Experiments indicating the contrary were considered either non-reproducible or subject to more acceptable interpretations. Recent developments suggest that the time is right to reconsider this consensus. We exhume the experiments of Beatrice Gelber [?-1991] on Pavlovian conditioning in the ciliate Paramecium aurelia, and suggest that criticisms of her findings can now be reinterpreted. ..."
Here is a recent example:
"[Researchers] showed that P. polycephalum became habituated to quinine and caffeine—two compounds that the slime mold normally stays clear of—if the compounds were placed on a bridge that gave the mold access to food. It took a long time for the molds to explore over the coated bridges to begin with, ... but once they started to do so, they seemed to stop minding the stimuli they’d previously avoided. ... Consistent with observations of habituation in multicellular animals, ... the molds “recovered” their aversion to the compounds if they went a couple of days without encountering them. The team performed careful controls to show that the habituation was specific to those compounds, and not just a fatigue response to sensory overload. ..."
Here is a related research article link:
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