A An investigator developed the idea that an excess of a particular chemical(RTQX)in the brain during infancy produced permanent mental retardation. To gather evidence for this notion, he used 30 infant rats and their mothers in an experiment. The rat (infant and mother) were assigned to two groups of 15 infant-mother combinations on a random basic. In one group, the C Group, the infants were nursed by the mother rats. In other group, the E Group, infant rats were kept separated from their mothers and fed by bottle. The chemical RTQX was mixed with the milk in the nursing bottle. Tests of mental development were made on both groups at various points in time, even far beyond the nursing period. At every point of the testing the infant rats in the E Group were found to be inferior to those in the C Group. The experimenter concluded that the chemical RTQX causes mental retardation. Do you agree?
B A psychologist, who also happened to be a musician, decided to test the hypothesis she had always held about the difference between musicians and non-musicians. Specifically, she believed that musicians are born with a “better ear” for music than non-musicians. For instance, she argued that musicians would be better able to detect differences in musical sounds than would non-musicians. She selected two group one made up of musicians and one made up of non-musicians. Musicians were selected from members of the local symphony orchestra; non-musicians were selected from members of local book club(all of whom had never seriously played a musical instrument). As attest of her hypothesis she gave both groups a task requiring difficult discriminations between similar musical tones. Her results showed that the performance of the musicians was vastly superior to that of the non-musicians she concluded that her hypothesis that musicians naturally have a better ear for music was strongly supported. Do you agree?