Plants may not be getting enough credit. Not only do they remember when you touch them, it turns out that they can make risky decisions that are as sophisticated as those made by humans, all without brains or complex nervous systems. And they may even judge risks more efficiently than we do.

Those are the findings of a study published Thursday in Current Biology. Researchers showed that when faced with the choice between a pot containing constant levels of nutrients or one with unpredictable levels, a plant will pick the mystery pot when conditions are sufficiently poor.

“It raises a question, not about plants, but about animals and humans, because if plants can solve this problem simply,” then maybe humans can, too, said Hagai Shemesh, a plant ecologist at Tel-Hai College in Israel who worked on the study. “We have a very fancy brain, but maybe most of the time we’re not using it.”

In a set of experiments, Dr. Shemesh and Alex Kacelnik, a behavioral ecologist at Oxford University, grew pea plants and split their roots between two pots. Both pots had the same amount of nutrients on average, but in one, the levels were constant; in the other, they varied over time. Then the researchers switched the conditions so that the average nutrients in both pots would be equally high or low, and asked: Which pot would a plant prefer?