#14- Concept Reference, Must Be True

[impawsible]

You're actually referring to answer D here, impawsible, not E, so I'll assume that was a misdescription (but more likely a typo than a "cognitive error," right? )

Your negation is okay, although I would have chosen "not necessarily easier to study" rather than focusing on the likelihood of cognitive errors. But generally speaking I would not have used a negation approach at all here, because it's just too awkward to be helpful. The issue raised isn't conditional, and I tend to save the negation technique for claims that are clearly conditional.

That said, if you were to use a version of the negation technique on Must Be True or Most Strongly Supported answer choices in Reading Comp, you would want to think of the negation as conflicting with the information in the passage, rather than proving something wrong. The negation should not make sense in light of what the passage said. And in that sense, your negation does reveal D to be a good answer, because the passage says that children as "less capable of identifying these thoughts." Less capable than adults, or more likely to make mistakes than adults are. Your negation conflicts with that statement, which supports that answer as being a reasonable inference supported by the passage. So your analysis in C) in your post is spot on!

I think the simplest way to answer this question is to look at what we know about children from the passage. All we know is that they made more mistakes than adults make when describing their thoughts, even though they did accurately describe the things they were thinking about. In short, what we know is that they made mistakes. So if we are to infer anything about why they made good test subjects, it can only be something that has to do with their mistakes. We were told nothing else about them, so we can infer nothing else about them. Only answer D brings that up, so it must be the best answer.

Thank you so much for the thorough explanation, Adam! And HA yes, poor typing skills as opposed to poor inference of thoughts.