Q7 - In an experiment, biologists

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Necessary Assumption

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: The snail must have learned to associate the bright light with the shaking of the tank.
Evidence: Experimenters [obnoxiously] shone a light into the tank while shaking it. The snail tensed its foot in response. Later, they JUST shone the light, and the snail still tensed its foot.

Answer Anticipation:
Assumption: snails are receptive to Pavlov's Classical conditioning. (jk) If we were to adopt the Anti-Conc mindset, we'd have to think of a way to argue that the snail did NOT ever learn to associate the bright light with the tank shaking. So how, then, would we explain why the snail tensed its foot, even when the tank wasn't shaken? Hmm. Maybe snails tense their foot in response to bright light? The author would have to assume that this is not the case.

Correct Answer:
D

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) Extreme = "all", "same". The conclusion is about THE snail, not "snails", so there's not any reason the author needs to assume that this snail is representative of other snails.

(B) Close, but not quite. If snails ARE ordinarily exposed to bright lights, it might be harder for them to learn to pair bright light with tank shaking, but it's still possible.

(C) This is the same as (A). Since this is about THE snail, not "snails", there is no assumption of representativeness going on.

(D) Yes! This was our prephrase. If we negate this, we get "the bright light alone WOULD usually cause the snail's foot to tense". If that's true, then when we ONLY shine a light into the tank and we see that the snail tenses it's foot, we already have the explanation why: the bright light did it.

(E) This is a real world trap. In Classical Conditioning, you would probably always be dealing with an instinctual response (dogs' salivating in response to food) and then try to pair it with an arbitrary stimulus (ringing a bell). But this argument doesn't actually presume anything about classical conditioning. The author's argument isn't impacted if the tensing is a learned response. I could shine a bright light while someone sneezes, and the subjects would react with their learned response of saying "Bless You". Later, if shining the bright light alone makes the subjects say "Bless You", I can still argue that the subjects must have learned to associate the shining of the light with someone sneezing.

Takeaway/Pattern: This argument can be pretty much "solved" up front, and this starts by assigning yourself the Anti-Conclusion mindset. If an author is concluding some Interpretation of / Explanation for her background facts, our primary job is to think of some Alternative Explanation for the same facts. Here, the author was trying to explain why the snail would tense its foot in response to JUST the bright light. The least creative alternative explanation, "the light causes the foot to tense", was all that was being tested.

#officialexplanation

[tzyc]

I understand why (D) is correct (because to show they "learned", they need to assume the way it behaves did not happen before), but how about (C)?
I thought, it may be needed because if the snail is different a lot from the others, so if it is unique, it may not mean it learned how to behave, but just some abnormal thing happened.
Why is (C) wrong?

Thank you

[joshringu]

Hi!

My first post in response to a question about the LSAT . I just took this preptest today and found it particularly challenging. Not sure if I am "correct" in my way of thinking, but I will take a go at it.

After the reading the stimulus during the exam, I presumed that the author assumed the sea snail does not naturally tense up when a bright light is shone to it. So I started to look for an answer that gives out this idea.

(A) This answer choice is not necessary. All sea snails do not need to react the "same way" as the sea snails in the experiment did.

(B) I found this very tempting because it seemed to bring out the idea I mentioned previously. However, it is a weak answer because it doesn't mention the sea snails being tense. Let's look at the negative. Sea snails are ordinarily exposed to bright lights such as the ones in the experiment. It doesn't destroy the argument because sea snails could still not tense their foot even though they are exposed to this type of light.

(C) This answer choice is also tempting. But to me it is not a necessary assumption for the argument. Let's take the negative. The sea snail used in the experiment did differ significantly from the others. So what? The conclusion still holds, it still could be possible that the association occurred.

(D) Gets to the assumption made by the author. He or she is assuming that the sea snail does not ordinarily tense its foot with the bright light, and it was learned after the association.

(E) Weakens the argument. If it is instinctual, the learned response from the association, i.e. the tensing of the foot by the bright light, could not have occurred.

Hope that helps!

[tommywallach]

Hey Tz,

Great response from Josh here. The only thing I want to add is that (A) and (C) are wrong for the exact same reason. Look at the conclusion:

Conclusion: Therefore, the snail must have learned to associate light with shaking.

The conclusion is only about this one snail. So it doesn't matter if that snail is "normal." Now imagine if the conclusion tried to say something like:

Conclusion: Therefore, snails can associate light with shaking.

In this case, (C) would be more relevant, because we'd be generalizing from this one snail out to all snails.

Hope that helps!

-t

[ChloeC62]

Question Type:
Necessary Assumption

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: The snail must have learned to associate the bright light with the shaking of the tank.
Evidence: Experimenters [obnoxiously] shone a light into the tank while shaking it. The snail tensed its foot in response. Later, they JUST shone the light, and the snail still tensed its foot.

Answer Anticipation:
Assumption: snails are receptive to Pavlov's Classical conditioning. (jk) If we were to adopt the Anti-Conc mindset, we'd have to think of a way to argue that the snail did NOT ever learn to associate the bright light with the tank shaking. So how, then, would we explain why the snail tensed its foot, even when the tank wasn't shaken? Hmm. Maybe snails tense their foot in response to bright light? The author would have to assume that this is not the case.

Correct Answer:
D

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) Extreme = "all", "same". The conclusion is about THE snail, not "snails", so there's not any reason the author needs to assume that this snail is representative of other snails.

(B) Close, but not quite. If snails ARE ordinarily exposed to bright lights, it might be harder for them to learn to pair bright light with tank shaking, but it's still possible.

(C) This is the same as (A). Since this is about THE snail, not "snails", there is no assumption of representativeness going on.

(D) Yes! This was our prephrase. If we negate this, we get "the bright light alone WOULD usually cause the snail's foot to tense". If that's true, then when we ONLY shine a light into the tank and we see that the snail tenses it's foot, we already have the explanation why: the bright light did it.

(E) This is a real world trap. In Classical Conditioning, you would probably always be dealing with an instinctual response (dogs' salivating in response to food) and then try to pair it with an arbitrary stimulus (ringing a bell). But this argument doesn't actually presume anything about classical conditioning. The author's argument isn't impacted if the tensing is a learned response. I could shine a bright light while someone sneezes, and the subjects would react with their learned response of saying "Bless You". Later, if shining the bright light alone makes the subjects say "Bless You", I can still argue that the subjects must have learned to associate the shining of the light with someone sneezing.

Takeaway/Pattern: This argument can be pretty much "solved" up front, and this starts by assigning yourself the Anti-Conclusion mindset. If an author is concluding some Interpretation of / Explanation for her background facts, our primary job is to think of some Alternative Explanation for the same facts. Here, the author was trying to explain why the snail would tense its foot in response to JUST the bright light. The least creative alternative explanation, "the light causes the foot to tense", was all that was being tested.

#officialexplanation

can you further explain about CLASSICAL CONDITIONAL REASONING? like what is it? when to use it/ why/when it is relevant?