A sixty-year-old woman tells her doctor that she is worried about possibly developing vascular dementia as she ages and would like to try to lower her risk. What advice could her doctor give her?

A. Learning that a particular tone signals an electric shock to the hand: This is classical conditioning (associative learning), not primarily executive control.
B. Driving home from work while a familiar song plays on the radio: This often involves automatized routines and procedural memory, not the active control processes of executive function.
C. Inhibiting a response that does not fit current task demands: inhibition is a core component of executive function (control, working memory, cognitive flexibility).
D. Riding a bicycle around the neighborhood: Once learned, bicycling is largely procedural/automatic and doesn’t directly index executive function.
E. Perceiving the difference between a ten-pound weight and a fifteen-pound weight: This is a perceptual discrimination task, not an executive-control activity.

A. Increased dendritic pruning: Chronic stress more often leads to dendritic atrophy or maladaptive neural changes, not beneficial pruning per se.
B. Increased digestive activity: Chronic stress typically suppresses digestive function (e.g., reduced appetite, ulcers), not increases it.
C. Decreased immune system function: prolonged elevated stress hormones (e.g., cortisol) suppress immune function, increasing susceptibility to illness.
D. Increased critical-thinking skills:Chronic stress generally impairs cognitive functioning rather than improving higher-order thinking.
E. Decreased risk of presbyopia: Presbyopia is age-related lens stiffening; stress does not decrease its risk.