Since the beginning of the 21st century, the Minimal Cognition approach has emerged vigorously, focusing on the study of the adaptive behavior of the simplest organisms, including bacteria, assuming that they are sentient and information-processing entities. Although Minimal Cognition has occasionally used Pavlovian methods to try to demonstrate Associative Learning, neither the Psychology of Learning nor the Comparative Psychology traditions are prominent in the movement. However, the Psychology of Learning approach, with its highly sophisticated experimental designs, has done a great deal of research on Associative Learning in animals and carried out several studies on plants and unicellular organisms. The present work offers a comprehensive review of these experimental results, among invertebrates, plants and unicellular organisms (paramecia and the amoeba Physarum policephalum) showing that, while there are increasing instances of Associative Learning in many invertebrate phyla (and also many phyla with no data) there is no adequate evidence of it in unicellular protists (despite more than a century of experiments with paramecia and amoeba) or in plants (despite recent results that so claim). We then consider the alternative offered by Minimal Cognition and suggest some complementary ideas, from a Comparative Developmental Psychology approach, which we call “Minimal Development.”

Studies on the social contagion of memory show that it is possible to create false memories from the wrong responses from other people without requiring their physical presence. The current study examined age differences between false memories via the modified social contagion paradigm. Twenty older and twenty younger adults were shown six household scenes and were exposed to the erroneous memory reports of an implied confederate who was not physically present. The presentation time of the scenes and the typicality of the contagion items were manipulated. The participants watched each scene individually and then took turns giving their recall responses with the responses belonging to a fictional participant provided by written cards. The results in a final individual recall test indicated a significant contagion effect in both groups of participants. Additionally, an effect of the typicality of the contagion items was observed, such that the more typical items produced more contagion than the less typical items. In relation to true recall, the older adults remembered significantly fewer items from the scenes than the younger ones and obtained a lower score in the word list subtest of the Weschler Memory Scale. Although the older group had an episodic memory deficit, they were not more susceptible to being affected by the wrong responses of other people than younger group.

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La sonificación es una herramienta de representación y análisis que emplea el sonido como conductor de una serie de datos. La trascripción sonora empleando frecuencia, intensidad y timbre permite expresar diferentes magnitudes y matices de un conjunto de observaciones. En el presente texto se mostrarán los fundamentos de la herramienta de la sonificación así como sus usos más comunes en psicología, entre los que se encuentran el aprendizaje motor, la discriminación perceptiva y representación de respuestas en ciertas patologías que conectan con el protagonismo del ritmo como factor imprescindible en la organización de lo orgánico. A través de la recopilación de la bibliografía existente se expondrán estas aplicaciones y sus posibilidades en otros campos de la psicología. A modo de ejemplificación, se propone una conversión sencilla de la representación gráfica de una curva normal en su versión auditiva. Como interpretación final, se destacarán las posibilidades del sonido como herramienta metodológica del análisis de datos, abriendo caminos interdisciplinares y multisensoriales en investigación.