Much like in humans, where the mind is studied by inference—what a person does—rather than neurological mechanisms, Karban is looking for patterns in behavior. “I’m a big fan of using what decades of psychology has learned, their methods, and asking if they apply to plants,” he says. “In some cases that’s no, and that’s fine.” But he’s found one method from the field of psychology research that truly seems to fit. The method helps researchers analyze behavior by separating it into two processes. The first is judgment, or the perception of raw information; the second is decision-making, or how
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