Study
Experience teaches plants to learn faster and forget slower in environments where it matters
Gagliano, Monica; Renton, Michael; Depczynski, Martial; Mancuso, Stefano
Oecologia, 2014
Mimosa pudica plants, which fold their leaves when disturbed, were dropped repeatedly a short distance on a custom rig. Leaf-folding was scored across repeated drops and after intervals of days, in plants raised under high and low light, and responsiveness to a genuinely novel stimulus was checked to distinguish habituation from exhaustion.
- Studied in
- Mimosa pudica
- Sample size
- 56 Mimosa pudica plants across light treatments
Plants stopped folding in response to the repeated drop within a small number of trials, continued to respond to a different disturbance, and still failed to respond to the drop when retested up to a month later. Plants in low-light conditions — where the cost of folding is higher — habituated faster.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
Mimosa shows habituation, a basic form of learning, with retention over weeks and a rate that varies adaptively with the cost of responding.
How NatureHQ reads it
The control that matters is the novel stimulus, because without it "stopped responding" means nothing more than a plant that has run out of whatever it uses to move. It kept responding to something else, which makes the case for habituation rather than fatigue. Habituation is real learning in the technical sense used for animals, and it is also the *simplest* kind — it is found in single-celled organisms and requires no nervous system. So this is evidence that plants learn in the narrowest sense of that word and no evidence at all for the broader senses. The same group's much stronger later claim, about associative learning in pea plants, is a separate matter and did not replicate.
- One species selected precisely because it has an unusually visible rapid movement.
- Habituation is the lowest bar for learning and does not generalise to associative learning.
- Scoring of leaf-folding involves judgement, and the analysis has been questioned.
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.
Published by: Springer journalsPublished in a Springer journal.
doi.org/10.1007/s00442-013-2873-7
This reference was resolved automatically against Crossref on 2026-08-11.
NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-08-11.