Artificial Surprise

Macedo, Luís; Cardoso, Amı́lcar; Reisenzein, Rainer; Lorini, Emiliano

doi:10.4018/978-1-60566-354-8.ch015

Cited by 26 publications

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“…According to the cognitive‐evolutionary theory of surprise, (a) the cognitive process responsible for surprise about an event is exclusively the appraisal of the event as schema‐discrepant or unexpected; that is, as conflicting with—explicit or implicit—expectations or beliefs; and (b) the intensity of surprise increases monotonically with the degree of schema‐discrepancy or unexpectedness (cf., Macedo et al., ; Meyer, ). These assumptions agree with the implicit theory of surprise contained in common‐sense psychology (see Smedslund, ), as well as with most traditional and contemporary scientific theories of surprise (Reisenzein, ; see also Barto, Mirolli, & Baldassarre, ).…”

Section: The Cognitive Cause Of Surprisementioning

confidence: 99%

“…In fact, in most empirical surprise research, these assumptions are taken for granted, in that they constitute the (if sometimes implicit) theoretical basis of the methods used to induce surprise. So strong is the perceived link between unexpectedness and surprise that several theories of surprise, including the cognitive‐evolutionary model, identify surprise with the appraisal of unexpectedness (e.g., Ortony, Clore, & Collins, ; see Macedo et al., ) or with the signal generated by the schema‐discrepancy detector (Reisenzein et al., ; note, however, that the unexpectedness signal can still be regarded as the cause of the surprise feeling ). Nevertheless, these assumptions about the cognitive cause and the nature of surprise have not gone unchallenged.…”

Section: The Cognitive Cause Of Surprisementioning

confidence: 99%

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The Cognitive‐Evolutionary Model of Surprise: A Review of the Evidence

Reisenzein

Horstmann

Schützwohl

2017

Topics in Cognitive Science

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Research on surprise relevant to the cognitive-evolutionary model of surprise proposed by Meyer, Reisenzein, and Schützwohl (1997) is reviewed. The majority of the assumptions of the model are found empirically supported. Surprise is evoked by unexpected (schema-discrepant) events and its intensity is determined by the degree if schema-discrepancy, whereas the novelty and the valence of the eliciting events probably do not have an independent effect. Unexpected events cause an automatic interruption of ongoing mental processes that is followed by an attentional shift and attentional binding to the events, which is often followed by causal and other event analysis processes and by schema revision. The facial expression of surprise postulated by evolutionary emotion psychologists has been found to occur rarely in surprise, for as yet unknown reasons. A physiological orienting response marked by skin conductance increase, heart rate deceleration, and pupil dilation has been observed to occur regularly in the standard version of the repetition-change paradigm of surprise induction, but the specificity of these reactions as indicators of surprise is controversial. There is indirect evidence for the assumption that the feeling of surprise consists of the direct awareness of the schema-discrepancy signal, but this feeling, or at least the self-report of surprise, is also influenced by experienced interference. In contrast, facial feedback probably does contribute substantially to the feeling of surprise and the evidence for the hypothesis that surprise is affected by the difficulty of explaining an unexpected event is, in our view, inconclusive. Regardless of how the surprise feeling is constituted, there is evidence that it has both motivational and informational effects. Finally, the prediction failure implied by unexpected events sometimes causes a negative feeling, but there is no convincing evidence that this is always the case, and we argue that even if it were so, this would not be a sufficient reason for regarding this feeling as a component, rather than as an effect of surprise.

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Section: The Cognitive Cause Of Surprisementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Cognitive Cause Of Surprisementioning

confidence: 99%

The Cognitive‐Evolutionary Model of Surprise: A Review of the Evidence

Reisenzein

Horstmann

Schützwohl

2017

Topics in Cognitive Science

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109

106

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“…People learn about their environment by explaining it (see Lombrozo, 2012, for a review), whether it be in child development (Piaget, 1952) or education (Adler, 2008), and this explanation process may be triggered by surprise (Ramscar, Dye, Gustafson & Klein, 2013;Tsang, 2013) or inconsistencies (Johnson-Laird, Girotto, & Legrenzi, 2004). These views are echoed in Artificial Intelligence (AI), where surprise has been identified as a cognitive mechanism for identifying learning events in robotic, agent architectures (Bae & Young, 2008Macedo & Cardoso, 2001;Macedo, Reisenzein & Cardoso, 2004;Macedo, Cardoso, Reisenzein, Lorini, & Castelfranchi, 2009). Traditionally, explanation is seen as playing a role in building causal models or predictive schemas to deal with future events (Heider, 1958;Lombrozo & Carey, 2006).…”

Section: Explanation Surprise and Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why some surprises are more surprising than others: Surprise as a metacognitive sense of explanatory difficulty

Foster

Keane

2015

Cognitive Psychology

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The UCD community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters! (@ucd_oa) Some rights reserved. For more information, please see the item record link above. TitleWhy some surprises are more surprising than others: Surprise as a metacognitive sense of explanatory difficulty Publisher's statement This is the author's version of a work that was accepted for publication in Cognitive Psychology. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Cognitive Psychology (VOL 81, ISSUE 2015, (2015 Early theories of surprise, including Darwin's, argued that it was predominantly a basic emotion. Recently, theories have taken a more cognitive view of surprise, casting it as a process of "making sense of surprising events". The current paper advances the view that the essence of this sense-making process is explanation; specifically, that people's perception of surprise is a metacognitive estimate of the cognitive work involved in explaining an abnormal event. So, some surprises are more surprising because they are harder toexplain. This proposal is tested in eight experiments that explore how (i) the contents of memory can influence surprise, (ii) different classes of scenarios can retrieve more/less relevant knowledge from memory to explain surprising outcomes, (iii) how partial explanations constrain the explanation process reducing surprise, (iv) how, overall, any factor that acts to increase the cognitive work in explaining a surprising event, results in higher levels of surprise (e.g., task demands to find several rather than just one explanation). Across the present studies, using a many different materials, paradigms and measures, it is consistently and repeatedly found that the difficulty of explaining a surprising outcome is the best predictor for people's perceptions of the surprisingness of events. Alternative accounts of these results are considered, as are future directions for this research.

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“…We adopted the computational model of surprise of [16], [17] which is formally defined in Definition 1 (for related models see [20]). Macedo, Cardoso and Reisenzein computational model of surprise suggests that the intensity of surprise about an event E g , from a set of mutually exclusive events E 1 , E 2 , .…”

Section: A Surprise Value Of Informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Both models of artificial surprise were influenced by psychological theories of surprise (e.g., [19]), and both seek to capture essential aspects of human surprise (see for a comparison [20]). In agreement with most theories of human surprise, both models of artificial surprise conceptualize surprise as a fundamentally expectation-or belief-based cognitive phenomenon, that is, as a reaction to the disconfirmation of expectations or, more generally, beliefs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Arguments for a Computational Model for Forms of Selective Attention Based on Cognitive and Affective Feelings

Macedo

2013

2013 Humaine Association Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction

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We present arguments for a computational model of selective attention that relies on the assumption that uncertain, surprising and motive congruent/incongruent information demands attention from an intelligent agent. This computational model that we propose has been integrated into the architecture of a Belief-Desire-Intention artificial agent so that this can autonomously select relevant, interesting information of the (external or internal) environment while ignoring other less relevant information. The advantage is that the agent can communicate only that interesting, selective information to its processing resources (focus of the senses, decision-making, etc.) or to its human owner's processing resources so that these resources can be allocated more effectively. We provide both theoretical and empirical arguments for that computational model.

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Artificial Surprise

Cited by 26 publications

References 0 publications

The Cognitive‐Evolutionary Model of Surprise: A Review of the Evidence

The Cognitive‐Evolutionary Model of Surprise: A Review of the Evidence

Why some surprises are more surprising than others: Surprise as a metacognitive sense of explanatory difficulty

Arguments for a Computational Model for Forms of Selective Attention Based on Cognitive and Affective Feelings

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