Plant Cognition and Behavior: From Environmental Awareness to Synaptic Circuits Navigating Root Apices

Plants emerge as cognitive and intelligent organisms which coevolve with humans since the first flowering plants recognized primates as potential frugivores. Later, when humans started to settle down and initiated the agriculture, our coevolution with crop plants entered a new phase which allowed evolution of our civilization. Here we summarize recent advances in our understanding of plants relying, similarly as animals and humans, on learning and cognition to use their plant-specific behavior for survival. Although plants as such are sessile, their organs move actively and use these movements for active manipulation of their environment, both abiotic and biotic. Moreover, the major strategy of flowering plants is to control their animal pollinators and seed dispersers by providing them with food enriched not only with nutritive but also with manipulative and addictive compounds. There are several examples of cognitive supremacy of plants over animals.