A quantitative portrait of habituation in Stentor coeruleus
- 1Harvard University
Abstract
Habituation--the decrement in response to a series of stimuli--is a widespread form of learning observed across many organisms, including the unicellular organism Stentor coeruleus. A lesser-known feature of Stentor habituation, shared with animals, is potentiation: faster habituation to a second stimulus series despite partial or complete recovery of responsiveness before that series begins. This form of metaplasticity suggests that although the first-order habituation memory can decay during the recovery period between the two series, a persistent second-order memory mediates faster relearning. We investigate the response profile of Stentor across a range of stimulation frequencies and recovery periods to identify the timescales at which these memory traces operate. We introduce a statistical framework to infer both population and single-cell learning parameters, allowing us to quantify prior qualitative findings and examine relationships among parameters across cells. Two key findings are that potentiation is frequency-sensitive, and that recovery and potentiation are decoupled, consistent with a serial and hierarchical cascade of leaky integrator units underlying these processes. This quantitative portrait provides a foundation for mechanistic modeling of intracellular memory in Stentor.
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BibTeX
@misc{ramdas2026quantitative,
title = {{A quantitative portrait of habituation in Stentor coeruleus}},
author = {T. Ramdas and N. Doan and A. Theroux and S. J. Gershman},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = jun,
doi = {10.64898/2026.06.09.731162},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.09.731162v2},
note = {CC BY-NC},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - A quantitative portrait of habituation in Stentor coeruleus
AU - T. Ramdas
AU - N. Doan
AU - A. Theroux
AU - S. J. Gershman
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/06/09
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.06.09.731162
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.09.731162v2
AB - Habituation--the decrement in response to a series of stimuli--is a widespread form of learning observed across many organisms, including the unicellular organism Stentor coeruleus. A lesser-known feature of Stentor habituation, shared with animals, is potentiation: faster habituation to a second stimulus series despite partial or complete recovery of responsiveness before that series begins. This form of metaplasticity suggests that although the first-order habituation memory can decay during the recovery period between the two series, a persistent second-order memory mediates faster relearning. We investigate the response profile of Stentor across a range of stimulation frequencies and recovery periods to identify the timescales at which these memory traces operate. We introduce a statistical framework to infer both population and single-cell learning parameters, allowing us to quantify prior qualitative findings and examine relationships among parameters across cells. Two key findings are that potentiation is frequency-sensitive, and that recovery and potentiation are decoupled, consistent with a serial and hierarchical cascade of leaky integrator units underlying these processes. This quantitative portrait provides a foundation for mechanistic modeling of intracellular memory in Stentor.
ER -