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About

Audrey Dussutour is a pioneering French ethologist and cognitive ecologist whose work challenges fundamental assumptions about intelligence and memory. Her primary research areas include animal cognition, collective behavior, and the surprising capacities of organisms without brains. Dussutour’s most celebrated contribution is her 2012 study demonstrating that the brainless slime mold *Physarum polycephalum* can construct an externalized spatial “memory” to navigate complex environments—a paper that has garnered 273 citations and reshaped our understanding of cognition. By showing that memory can exist outside a nervous system, she opened new frontiers in minimal cognition and decentralized intelligence. Her work also explores how physical confinement can steer self-organization across biological and artificial systems, bridging physics, robotics, and biology. Dussutour’s research has profound implications for swarm robotics, material science, and our philosophical concept of what it means to remember. Through elegant experiments and clear storytelling, she has made the humble slime mold a model organism for studying decision-making, learning, and problem-solving without a brain. Her achievements have earned her international recognition, including the prestigious CNRS Silver Medal, cementing her as a leading voice in the study of unconventional cognition.