Critical Reasoning

Researchers have found that children as young as two year old toddlers use mathematical concepts such as probability to understand the world around them and make decisions accordingly. In an experiment conducted to study such behaviour, toddlers observed an experimenter play a game with two different colored buttons. The pressing of the button would sometimes release a marble and sometimes not. When these toddlers were asked to play the same game, 23 out of 32 toddlers chose to press the button that was more successful in generating a marble.

Which of the following, if true, is important to rule out the possibility that the toddlers made a choice purely based on frequency, i.e. the number of times a button returned marbles, rather than probability?


A. The toddlers who chose the button that returned a marble fewer number of times were measured to have the same IQ as the ones who chose the other button.

B. None of the toddlers were found to have color-blindness and could differentiate between the two buttons on the basis of their colors.

C. During the experimenter's turn at the game, both the buttons generated a marble the same number of times, though the number of attempts for each button varied significantly.

D. 19 out of 23 toddlers who chose the button that was more successful in generating marbles belonged to families in which one of the parents was a Mathematics teacher.

E. Both the buttons released marbles with the same number of unsuccessful attempts between two successful ones.