Bianca Bonato --- Beyond the brain --- Discussion Hour GRCDI Discussion Hour
Following her seminar Beyond the Brain: Cognition, Communication, and Social Behaviour in Plants, Bianca Bonato will lead an informal discussion exploring some of the broader conceptual questions arising from research on plant cognition and behaviour.
Participants are encouraged to engage with the recommended readings, available via the GRCDI website, in advance and contribute to an open discussion of these themes:
– Does the concept of ‘intelligence' hold scientific value, or is it merely a label for biological adaptation?
– If cognitive strategies exist in brainless organisms like plants or slime molds, where does cognition actually reside? in distributed physiological networks, or in the interaction with the environment itself?
– If coordination and communication occur in plants and microbes should sociality be redefined as an emergent system property rather than a neural capacity?
Bianca Bonato is an Assistant Professor in the Department of General Psychology at the University of Padova. She received her PhD in Psychological Science in 2024, developing interdisciplinary research at the intersection of comparative cognition, plant behaviour, and the biological sciences.
Her work explores social cognition across taxa, using climbing plants as an experimental model to investigate motor and communicative processes. She employs advanced methodologies, including 3D kinematic analysis and mass spectrometry, to open new avenues for the study of cognition.
* Readings
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