Explanation
Correct answer: D.
Choice D is the best answer because it identifies a question that directly addresses a potential confounding factor in the research. The text discusses a study investigating source misattribution for information retrieved with the assistance of a smartphone—that is, how well people remember whether they used a smartphone to look up information or retrieved the information from their memory. The researchers hypothesized that smartphone reliance causes people to mistakenly think that they retrieved the information from their memory when they in fact used a smartphone. To test this hypothesis, the researchers instructed participants to look up answers to some trivia questions on smartphones and to answer some questions using only their memory. The text then indicates that a week later, participants were more likely to misremember smartphone-assisted answers as coming from memory than to misremember memory-based answers as coming from smartphones. The researchers claimed that the higher misattribution rates for the smartphone-retrieval condition supported their hypothesis. However, the text doesn’t specify whether the study design accounted for the possibility that some participants might have known many—perhaps even all—of the trivia answers beforehand. If participants already knew some answers they were instructed to look up on their phones, their later attribution of those answers to memory might be accurate rather than a misattribution. Knowing how participants attributed information in such cases would help determine whether the observed effect reflects smartphone-induced misattribution or simply participants’ recall of prior knowledge. Thus, in evaluating the validity of the researchers’ claim, it would be most useful to know how participants attributed information they were instructed to retrieve from a phone in instances where they already knew the information.
Why the other choices are wrong
Choice A
Choice A is incorrect. Although survey timing is a methodological consideration, it doesn’t help distinguish between genuine misattribution caused by smartphone reliance and other explanations for the observed effect. Though it’s plausible that participants’ recollections of their information source may have been more accurate immediately after answering the trivia questions than they would have been a week later, the one-week delay would affect both conditions equally and doesn’t specifically challenge the researchers’ claim about smartphone-induced misattribution.
Choice B
Choice B is incorrect because confidence in the accuracy of retrieved information doesn’t directly pertain to source misattribution. The researchers’ claim concerns whether participants believed information came from their smartphone or their memory, not how confident they were in its correctness. Instead, a useful question would need to address the source-attribution process itself.
Choice C
Choice C is incorrect because the accuracy of the participants’ answers doesn’t bear on the researchers’ claim about source misattribution. The claim concerns the remembered origin of answers, not their correctness. Instead, the relevant issue is whether participants who looked up answers they already knew might have attributed those answers to memory regardless of which of the two experimental conditions they answered those questions under.