Context and overall objectives
Suppose to reach for an apple with the intention to either eat it (i.e., individual intention) or pass it to a partner (i.e., social intentions). Because we are in the presence of the very same action performed towards the very object one may think that how the movement is performed is these two occasions is similar. But this is not the case, how we put the hands on the same object vary depending on the motor intention guiding the action. In other words, intentions become “visible” in the surface flow of agents’ motion. This phenomenon has been shown in humans and other animal species, but no studies have investigated whether it extends to the “green” kingdom. ROOMors aims at investigating for the first time motor intentions in plants. It capitalizes on recent findings demonstrating that the kinematics (i.e., the mathematical description of movement characterizing the movement of pea plants is programmed in advance. They shape their tendrils according to the specific characteristics of the to-be-grasped support. This result reverts the general consensus that plants’ movement is only driven by cause-effect mechanisms and hard-wired reflexes and gives rise to a number of questions that only a few years ago might have considered absurd: to what extent plant can intentionally plan a movement? Is plant movement fine-tuned according to the motor intentions exhibited by the surrounding plants?
Work performed and main achievements
ROOMors will blend experimental psychology techniques to study intentional actions (i.e., kinematics) with plant physio-molecular approaches to identify the (mostly unknown) signalling pathways at the basis of the implementation and the decoding of motor intentions by plants. ROOMors will open a new path in psychological research that is more than about scientific discovery, it is about revolution that will compel us to see the green kingdom through a completely new lens.
– ROOMors will characterize
1) The concept of “intention in action” in plants. The motion primitives and the physiological mechanisms exhibited by climbing plants approaching and grasping a potential support in three different intention scenarios that ground solo and social behaviours, namely cooperation and competition. This experimentation will epitomize sociality in plants, grounding for the first time such long-held intuition on quantitative empirical results.
2) Whether plants are impermeable to deception. The social stance of plants (i.e., competition, cooperation) will be manipulated by introducing in the plants environment controlled amounts of chemical signalling which may trigger a different social attitude (i.e., roots exudates coming from a plant of the same progeny as the targeted plant; roots exudates coming from a plant of a different progeny or family).
3) Predictive coding in the context of interacting activities requiring close-body contact (plants growing intertwined) and interacting activities in which no physical contact is required such as in communicative interactions. Specifically, ROOMors will ascertain whether plants are able to read and predict the intention behind the movement of other plants acting nearby by using sensorial analysis and to adjust their behaviour accordingly.
4) The role of known and unknown potential genetic players for the determination of the intentional components underlying plants’ movement in response to the relationships with their neighbours, according to the degree of kinship.
Results beyond the state of the arts
This project is unique and innovative as it develops a radically, so far untested, new hypothesis to the study of motor intention. By investigating how plants are able to implement motor intentions by developmental reprogramming and to extract intentions from body growth motion during interaction with neighbours ROOMors pioneers a new area of research. It is a multidisciplinary project with exciting basic science and translational implications: (i) to provide an integrative and radically new approach to the study of an otherwise unobservable component of action such as intentionality; (ii) to uncover the mechanisms propelling individual and social intentions in plants and their differences; (iii) to demonstrate that despite plants and animals are two very unique evolutionary adaptations for multicellular life they have evolved signalling networks and mechanisms based on a common tool-set from our unicellular common ancestor; (iv) to help in the acquisition of specific knowledge that can be used to craft environments for a more evolved society, one that is connected and attuned to nature; (vii) to inspire new decision making strategies based on the mechanisms used by plants to model social networks; (viii) to provide data to artificial intelligence (AI) scientists for the construction of plants-inspired robots. A new generation of robots based on ‘green’ architectures, which would be alternative to the neural architectures commonly used to guide robots’ behaviour and other artificial systems. Finding the Rosetta stone of green social communication will be fundamental to understand whether a transfer of information so diffused would allow for a better comprehension of the communication among living organisms. Importantly this will give us a glimpse to how plants react to environmental changes. Climate changes strongly impact on the incidence (in terms of frequency, severity, combinations etc.) of stress events, thus affecting plant tolerance. The individual mechanisms underlying their phenotypic plasticity to these changes are crucial to guarantee their survival or their predominance as much as their diffusion and will significantly impact on the entire echo-system composition and structure. Further, needless to remember that some genes not only are conserved between plants and animals but also regulate behavioural and physiological responses to both. ROOMors may be able to parallel plant and human biology by identifying those genes which allow to take advantage of both context and motor cues types to infer others intentions.
