Starfish Behavior as an Anticipatory System: Its Flexibility in Obstacle Avoidance

As starfish do not have central nervous systems, their behaviors such as walking, righting, feeding, and so on, must be produced by some processes of self‐organization of many motor organs. It has been noticed that self‐organized behavioral patterns are not strictly determined by external stimuli, though such stimuli may elicit the very self‐organization processes. In this sense, starfish are not only reactive like a conventional discourse of comparative psychology have presupposed. In this study, I will show diversity in self‐organized behavior of a starfish exhibited under experiments on obstacle avoidance. The starfish may be considered as an anticipatory system, because it usually appeared to be free from serious deadlock at the obstacles. I will also discuss that to view the animal as an anticipatory system may have an interesting implication on the fields of behavioral biology and comparative psychology.