“What the People Give, They Can Take Away”

Provisions for the direct recall of elected representatives before the completion of their terms allow unsatisfied citizens to gather a number of signatures and submit to a vote his or her continuity in office. Following a Latin American trend, it was introduced for the first time in Bolivia with the 2009's Constitution. Since then, according to the regulation, there were two periods in which recall petitions were enabled–2013 and 2018–in which a total of 369 requests were registered at the subnational level. However, despite the number of initiatives, with only one exception (Bolpebra, Pando), none of them achieved a recall election. This chapter explores the reasons explaining the low number of initiatives achieving a vote. The study offers a comparative analysis of institutional designs and an in-depth study of attempts as well as the vote in Bolpedra.

Exemplar-based judgment or direct recall: On a problematic procedure for estimating parameters in exemplar models of quantitative judgment

Exemplar models are often used in research on multiple-cue judgments to describe the underlying process of participants’ responses. In these experiments, participants are repeatedly presented with the same exemplars (e.g., poisonous bugs) and instructed to memorize these exemplars and their corresponding criterion values (e.g., the toxicity of a bug). We propose that there are two possible outcomes when participants judge one of the already learned exemplars in some later block of the experiment. They either have memorized the exemplar and their respective criterion value and are thus able to recall the exact value, or they have not learned the exemplar and thus have to judge its criterion value, as if it was a new stimulus. We argue that psychologically, the judgments of participants in a multiple-cue judgment experiment are a mixture of these two qualitatively distinct cognitive processes: judgment and recall. However, the cognitive modeling procedure usually applied does not make any distinction between these processes and the data generated by them. We investigated potential effects of disregarding the distinction between these two processes on the parameter recovery and the model fit of one exemplar model. We present results of a simulation as well as the reanalysis of five experimental data sets showing that the current combination of experimental design and modeling procedure can bias parameter estimates, impair their validity, and negatively affect the fit and predictive performance of the model. We also present a latent-mixture extension of the original model as a possible solution to these issues.

Biased confabulation in risky choice

When people make risky decisions based on past experience, they must rely on memory. The nature of the memory representations that support these decisions is not yet well understood. A key question concerns the extent to which people recall specific past episodes or whether they have learned a more abstract rule from their past experience. To address this question, we examine the precision of the memories used in risky decisions-from-experience. In two pre-registered experiments, we presented people with risky options, where the outcomes were drawn from continuous ranges (e.g., 100-190 or 500-590), and then assessed their memories for the outcomes experienced. In a preferential task, people were more risk seeking for high-value than low-value options, choosing as though they overweighted the outcomes from more extreme ranges. Moreover, people were very poor at recalling the exact outcomes encountered, but rather confabulated outcomes that were consistent with the outcomes they had seen and also biased towards the more extreme ranges encountered. This pattern emerged in both a preferential choice task and in a pure evaluation task, suggesting that the observed decision bias reflects a more basic cognitive process to overweight extreme outcomes in memory. These results highlight the importance of the edges of the distribution in providing the encoding context for memory recall. They also suggest that episodic memory influences decision-making through a rule-based abstraction and not through direct recall of specific instances.

QUESTIONING TECHNIQUES AND HIGH ORDER THINGKING IN STUDENTS LEARNING GROUP

Questioning is an essential strategy for effective communication. This study examined questioning techniques used by students and the Critical thinking processes involved in questioning. There was also an attempt to find out the differences between the patterns of using questions between the two groups. Data were sourced from student learning group through audio and video taping the sessions and were analyzed using types of questioning. Findings indicated that students asked higher order in level questions such as open - ended, interpretive, and evaluative, inquiry, inferential, and synthesis, while most students raised lower cognitive questions including facts, closed, direct, recall, and knowledge type questions. It is suggested that using higher level questioning technique, more frequently used by teacher as more competent speakers in comparison to students, can foster learning and students are required to attend higher levels of questioning techniques to enhance their speculative, inferential and evaluative thinking ability