Franz Kuchling, Isha Singh, Mridushi Daga, Susan Zec, Alexandra Kunen, and Michael Levin

Learning and a spectrum of other behavioral competencies allow organisms to rapidly adapt to dynamically changing environmental variations. The emerging field of diverse intelligence seeks to understand what systems, besides ones with complex brains, exhibit these capacities. Here, we tested predictions of a general computational framework based on the free energy principle in neuroscience but applied to aneural biological process as established previously, by demonstrating and manipulating pattern recognition in a simple aneural organism, the green algae Volvox. Our studies of the adaptive photoresponse in Volvox reveal that aneural organisms can distinguish between patterned and randomized inputs and indicate how this is achieved mechanistically. We show that the phototactic response in Volvox adapts more readily to regular light pulse patterns than to irregular ones, thus exhibiting a crucial component of basal intelligence – generalization: the ability to recognize patterns in input stimuli. Randomized electric shocks reduced the ability of Volvox to maintain adaptive phototaxis significantly more than regularly applied electric shocks, providing first evidence for a stress effect of randomized input patterns in a primitive organism. Moreover, we detected memory in Volvox – a persistence of movement towards past light stimulation through their phototactic orientation, another foundational aspect of neural-like primitive cognition. Combined, these data reveal that Volvox exhibit a capacity for pattern recognition consistent with uncertainty minimization. The ability of algae to be surprised and distinguish random events that do not meet expected patterns further expands neurobiological concepts beyond neurons. These methods can likely be translated to the study and manipulation of basal cognition in many other living systems.

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