COURSES TAUGHT:
PLANT LEARNING:
Plant Learning by Association
We aim to clarify the question of whether plants, as brainless organisms, can learn by association.
In these particular experiments, we use pea plants following previous work carried out by Dr. Gagliano (2016) and others.
We are testing whether, through training, plants are capable of associating a neutral variable (wind), with a non-neutral stimulus such as light.
Since plants require light for survival, we would like to test whether plants can associate the direction that light will come from based on the direction of the wind.
We perform training sessions followed by a test day and we would expect the plants to grow toward the neutral variable (wind), even if that contradicts that last position plants have seen light during test day.
We have been carrying out this experiment by placing plants on a Y maze where they are exposed to light and wind in each side of the maze.
We also perform control experiments to show pea's 'natural' reaction to light as well as to wind, to show that wind is in fact a neutral variable to the pea plants.
If it is the case the plants learn by association, we would like to further our understanding of plant learning by testing different molecular mechanisms that might underlie learning processes in plants.