Nelma Is a Healthy 70-Year-Old Who Would Like to Learn

question 23

Multiple Choice

Nelma is a healthy 70-year-old who would like to learn to play video games with her grandson. According to research on learning late in life, Nelma _____.

• A) is past the age where learning to play video games is possible
• B) should spend her time doing crossword puzzles instead, because they help prevent dementia
• C) could learn to play games if she begins at the easiest level and practices regularly
• D) could learn to play games in the short term but would soon forget and need to be retaught

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Definitions:

Heuristics

Mental shortcuts or rules of thumb that allow people to make decisions and solve problems quickly and efficiently, though not always perfectly accurate.

Overconfidence

The phenomenon where an individual's subjective confidence in their judgments is reliably greater than their objective accuracy.

Representativeness Heuristic

A cognitive shortcut that involves judging the probability of an event by how closely it matches one's prototype of that event.

Confirmation Bias

A propensity for selecting, interpreting, favoring, and recollecting data that affirms one's previously held beliefs or suppositions.