Apply your critical thinking skills to the accompanying research study descripti

Question

Apply your critical thinking skills to the accompanying research study description. Use the five critical thinking questions provided in the text as a basis for your response. What am I being asked to believe or accept? What evidence supports this position? Are there other ways this evidence could be interpreted? What other evidence would I need to evaluate these alternatives? What are the most reasonable conclusions? A newspaper headline reads "Intellectual pursuits key to preventing Alzheimer's disease?" The researchers scanned the brains of healthy seniors with no memory loss and asked the seniors to recall how much reading, writing, and game-playing they did when they were growing up. The researchers found that those who reported doing daily brain activities from a young age had very low levels of amyloid plaques, which are associated with Alzheimer's disease. The study involved fewer than 100 participants and could not account for certain factors that may have confounded the results, including socio-economic factors, diet, and overall health behaviors that might also contribute to amyloid plaque formation and Alzheimer's risk. It also asked participants, whose average age was 76, to recall how much reading, writing, and game-playing they did when they were in elementary school, high school, and as young adults

Explanation / Answer

The research suffers from several pitfalls due to which we cannot be sure about the validity of the findings. Firstly, it only assesses adults who have a healthy brain for the study, which is somewhat like the logical fallacy of circular reasoning. The researchers should have also made use of participants suffering from Alzheimer’s and then compared them to healthy participants. Secondly, since no extraneous variables are controlled, it is likely that the precise relationship between the independent and dependent variable is convoluted. Finally, the study relies on the memories of the participants for data collection, instead of using an objective measure. This again can introduce a high degree of subjectivity and produce false results.

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