It took a long while for the octopuses to learn to do this, but in the end, nearly all of the octopuses that were tested succeeded. The eyes can guide the arms. At the same time, the paper also noted that when octopuses are doing well with this task, the arm that’s finding the food appears to do its own local exploration as it goes, crawling and feeling around. So it seems that two forms of control are working in tandem: there is central control of the arm’s overall path, via the eyes, combined with a fine-tuning of the search by the arm itself.
