Can single-cell organisms learn like higher animals? We tried to address this question by experimenting with paramecium using a classical conditioning protocol. Although the experiments ultimately didn’t provide conclusive results and my custom code for inferring paramecia motion trajectory from microscopy video was somewhat unreliable, the resulting processed video was still quite amusing to look at. At certain time points, a pair of conditional (vibration) and unconditional stimuli (electric shock) were delivered to the apparatus containing swimming paramecia, and the percentage of forward-moving paramecia was recorded. It appears that at the later part of the experiment trial, some paramecia pre-emptively responded to the conditional stimulus before the unconditional stimulus was applied.

A plot after analyzing the processed video showing fractions of forward moving paramecia over time in the classical conditioning experiment setup