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| The effects of light and electricity on decision making of planarians This website was made by Dan Moss and Dan Shuman, two 9th grade honors biology students at Medfield High School. We put many long hours into making this website and hope you will be able to use it as a valuable resource. Abstract Planarians are invertebrate flatworms that live in fresh water and are often used in experiments because of the short amount of time they take to regenerate body parts. Our purpose was to determine whether planarians are smart enough to associate an electrical shock with the color black. We tested planarians in a T-shaped maze to see whether they could associate the color black with a small electrical shock. Our control was white tape instead of black tape at the entrance to the third arm of the maze. We tested five different planarians for each color and allowed them to each make twenty decisions in the maze. Our major findings conclude that planarians can associate the color black with an electrical shock. We have also concluded that at the age of three weeks planarians begin to disintegrate and eventually die. In conclusion, planarians are quite intelligent for their small nature and have a decision making mechanism that allows planarians to associate color with an electrical shock.
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