invited speakers – James (JC) Cahill
James (JC) Cahill is a professor of ecology at the University of Alberta, Canada. From the United States originally, he received his B.A. from Trinity College (CT) and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Throughout his career, he has mentored over 100 research students in his lab, and he and his team have published over 150 peer-reviewed papers. Dr. Cahill’s research program is focused on experimental plant ecology, working at the interface of plant behavior, community ecology, and conservation. A central theme in his lab group is to rethink plant biology through the lens of behavior, working to understand the ecological and evolutionary processes that underlie individual organisms. This holistic approach contrasts with the traditional reductionist view of ‘plants as factories’. Through experimental work and conceptual development, Cahill’s group has been instrumental in providing a data-driven understanding of the surprising complexity of plant behaviours. A longer-term goal is to understand better plant social interactions and when and why they may vary between competitive and facilitative. Such understanding has important consequences for critical conservation issues, such as preserving biodiversity, controlling invasive species, and sustainable practices in managed systems.
What would plant cognition look like? An experimental approach to understanding
In this talk, I will discuss the challenges of finding agreement about what evidence would or would not support the concept of plant cognition. This work will primarily be forward-looking, outlining priorities for future research. The impetus for this project stems from the fact that it is well-recognized that plants perform a diversity of complex behaviors that, if demonstrated by other taxa, may be considered evidence of cognition. However, in plant biology, empirical studies of plant behaviour are largely separated from those of the broader field of comparative psychology. Lacking is still a unified conceptual foundation for cognition accepted in both the botanical and behavioural communities. Here, we propose to use the signature-testing framework as a guide to understanding the limits of plant problem-solving. With plant cognition as a hypothesis, we will utilize ‘botanical rat mazes’ to identify successes and failures related to plant root foraging and increasingly challenging environmental puzzles. We believe positive outcomes will emerge most rapidly when we focus on the highly novel behaviors we can identify and contextualize them with the vast number of puzzles plants appear unable to solve.