Although I didn't read. I'd assume and hope they had some basic controls in place like an untrained worm decapitated and also a trained worm non decapitated
The experiment does not sound too good to me. They had to retrain the formerly decapitated worms. The article does not mention how much faster the "refresher course" trained the decapitated worms.
>Headless fragments regenerated from familiarized worms displayed slightly shorter feeding latency compared with headless fragments from unfamiliarized worms ... However, the effect was not statistically significant.
So, no. But they do better with the refresher course than other worms if I understand correctly.
>However, the effect was not statistically significant. //
AKA - there's no effect as far as we can tell without further experiment.
Correction: the paper (http://jeb.biologists.org/content/early/2013/06/27/jeb.08780...) is talking about the worms before re-familiarisation. They claim significance for previously "trained" worms being faster at picking up the training post decap+regen.
Would the worms remember without this “refresher course”?