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

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.

[1]  Karl J. Friston,et al.  Free-energy and the brain , 2007, Synthese.

[2]  Zoe Drayson,et al.  Modularity and the predictive mind , 2017 .

[3]  Roger C. Schank,et al.  Explanation Patterns: Understanding Mechanically and Creatively , 1986 .

[4]  J. Hohwy.  The Predictive Mind , 2013 .

[5]  A. Schützwohl,et al.  Surprise and schema strength , 1998 .

[6]  G. Horstmann.  Attentional capture by an unannounced color singleton depends on expectation discrepancy. , 2005, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[7]  Bertram Gawronski,et al.  Cognitive consistency: a fundamental principle in social cognition , 2012 .

[8]  W. R.,et al.  History of Astronomy , 1909, Nature.

[9]  Pc,et al.  An Introduction to Social Psychology , 1920, Nature.

[10]  Niels A. Kloosterman,et al.  Pupil size tracks perceptual content and surprise , 2015, The European journal of neuroscience.

[11]  Luís Macedo,et al.  The exploration of unknown environments populated with entities by a surprise–curiosity-based agent , 2012, Cognitive Systems Research.

[12]  D. Mandel.  Violations of coherence in subjective probability: A representational and assessment processes account , 2008, Cognition.

[13]  A. Schützwohl,et al.  The processing of affectively valenced stimuli: The role of surprise , 2005 .

[14]  A. Tversky,et al.  Variants of uncertainty , 1982, Cognition.

[15]  Christopher L Asplund,et al.  Surprise-induced blindness: a stimulus-driven attentional limit to conscious perception. , 2010, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[16]  A. Clark.  Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science. , 2013, The Behavioral and brain sciences.

[17]  W. Meyer,et al.  Toward a Process Analysis of Emotions: The Case of Surprise , 1997 .

[18]  G. Ben-Shakhar,et al.  Novelty and significance in orientation and habituation: a feature-matching approach. , 1990, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[19]  Guido H. E. Gendolla,et al.  Surprise and Motivation of Causal Search: How Are They Affected by Outcome Valence and Importance? , 2001 .

[20]  Cristiano Castelfranchi,et al.  Expectancy and Emotion , 2014 .

[21]  Hilde Haider,et al.  Conflicts between expected and actually performed behavior lead to verbal report of incidentally acquired sequential knowledge , 2009, Psychological research.

[22]  Carl C. H. Petersen,et al.  Higher Nervous Functions , 2007 .

[23]  P. Steerenberg,et al.  Targeting pathophysiological rhythms: prednisone chronotherapy shows sustained efficacy in rheumatoid arthritis. , 2010, Annals of the rheumatic diseases.

[24]  Gernot Horstmann,et al.  The surprise–attention link: a review , 2015, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

[25]  E. Schröger.  The mismatch negativity as a tool to study auditory processing , 2005 .

[26]  Ulrich Ansorge,et al.  Surprise capture and inattentional blindness , 2016, Cognition.

[27]  E. Brandstätter,et al.  A cognitive‐emotional account of the shape of the probability weighting function , 2002 .

[28]  A. Cardoso,et al.  Modeling Forms of Surprise in Artificial Agents: Empirical and Theoretical Study of Surprise Functions , 2004 .

[29]  D. Berlyne.  Conflict, arousal, and curiosity , 2014 .

[30]  Alexander F. Shand,et al.  The foundations of character , 1914 .

[31]  Arvid Herwig,et al.  Novelty biases attention and gaze in a surprise trial , 2016, Attention, perception & psychophysics.

[32]  A Schützwohl,et al.  [Structure and intensity of surprise]. , 2001, Zeitschrift fur experimentelle Psychologie : Organ der Deutschen Gesellschaft fur Psychologie.

[33]  Michel Tuan Pham,et al.  When Do People Rely on Affective and Cognitive Feelings in Judgment? A Review , 2011, Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

[34]  Dennis Rünger,et al.  How incidental sequence learning creates reportable knowledge: the role of unexpected events. , 2008, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[35]  R. Reisenzein,et al.  Evidence for strong dissociation between emotion and facial displays: the case of surprise. , 2006, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[36]  G Horstmann,et al.  [Effect of associative strength of schema elements on intensity of startle reaction]. , 1998, Zeitschrift fur experimentelle Psychologie : Organ der Deutschen Gesellschaft fur Psychologie.

[37]  M. Niepel,et al.  Independent manipulation of stimulus change and unexpectedness dissociates indices of the orienting response. , 2001, Psychophysiology.

[38]  B. Bilgin,et al.  Losses loom more likely than gains: Propensity to imagine losses increases their subjective probability , 2012 .

[39]  Jorge L. Armony,et al.  Current Emotion Research in Behavioral Neuroscience: The Role(s) of the Amygdala , 2013 .

[40]  Rainer Reisenzein,et al.  On the expression and experience of surprise: no evidence for facial feedback, but evidence for a reverse self-inference effect. , 2007, Emotion.

[41]  Stefanie I. Becker,et al.  Perceptual salience captures the eyes on a surprise trial , 2016, Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics.

[42]  W. Einhäuser,et al.  Pupil Dilation Signals Surprise: Evidence for Noradrenaline’s Role in Decision Making , 2011, Front. Neurosci..

[43]  R. Reisenzein.  Exploring the Strength of Association between the Components of Emotion Syndromes: The Case of Surprise , 2000 .

[44]  Stefanie I. Becker,et al.  Effects of stimulus–onset asynchrony and display duration on implicit and explicit measures of attentional capture by a surprising singleton , 2008 .

[45]  M. Pezzo,et al.  Surprise, defence, or making sense: What removes hindsight bias? , 2003, Memory.

[46]  Timothy E. J. Behrens,et al.  Dissociable effects of surprise and model update in parietal and anterior cingulate cortex , 2013, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[47]  E. N. Sokolov.  Higher nervous functions; the orienting reflex. , 1963, Annual review of physiology.

[48]  K. Teigen,et al.  Surprises: low probabilities or high contrasts? , 2003, Cognition.

[49]  David Hume.  A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to introduce the experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects , 1972 .

[50]  O V Lipp,et al.  Effects of stimulus preexposure and intermodality change on electrodermal orienting. , 1994, Psychophysiology.

[51]  Joe Dewhurst,et al.  Folk Psychology and the Bayesian Brain , 2017 .

[52]  Seger M. Breugelmans,et al.  On the valence of surprise , 2013, Cognition & emotion.

[53]  Udo Rudolph,et al.  An experimental analysis of surprise , 1991 .

[54]  Achim Schützwohl,et al.  Die Struktur der Intensität von Überraschung , 2001 .

[55]  Mark T. Keane,et al.  Making sense of surprise: an investigation of the factors influencing surprise judgments. , 2011, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[56]  D. Siddle,et al.  Effects of intermodality change on electrodermal orienting and on the allocation of processing resources. , 1993, Psychophysiology.

[57]  Paul T. P. Wong,et al.  When people ask "why" questions, and the heuristics of attributional search. , 1981 .

[58]  K. Scherer.  Appraisal considered as a process of multilevel sequential checking. , 2001 .

[59]  J. Laird,et al.  Emotion-Specific Effects of Facial Expressions and Postures on Emotional Experience , 1989 .

[60]  W.-V. Meyer,et al.  Die Rolle von Überraschung im Attributionsprozess , 1988 .

[61]  Dylan M. Jones,et al.  Journal of Experimental Psychology : Learning , Memory , and Cognition Broken Expectations : Violation of Expectancies , Not Novelty , Captures Auditory Attention , 2011 .

[62]  Pierre Baldi,et al.  Bayesian surprise attracts human attention , 2005, Vision Research.

[63]  Sander Greenland,et al.  Surprise! , 2020, American journal of epidemiology.

[64]  Joshua W. Brown,et al.  Medial prefrontal cortex as an action-outcome predictor , 2011, Nature Neuroscience.

[65]  Arthur P. DeMarzo,et al.  Hypertension Control Rate Should be Defined Consistently and Used to Motivate Action to Improve , 2019, High Blood Pressure & Cardiovascular Prevention.

[66]  C. Darwin.  The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals , .

[67]  A. Schützwohl,et al.  Surprise and schema strength. , 1998, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[68]  A. Barto,et al.  Novelty or Surprise? , 2013, Front. Psychol..

[69]  Mark T. Keane,et al.  Why some surprises are more surprising than others: Surprise as a metacognitive sense of explanatory difficulty , 2015, Cognitive Psychology.

[70]  Robert Gaschler,et al.  Data-driven sequence learning or search: What are the prerequisites for the generation of explicit sequence knowledge? , 2012, Advances in cognitive psychology.

[71]  J. Laird,et al.  Feelings: The Perception of Self , 2007 .

[72]  Rainer Reisenzein,et al.  Children’s and Adults’ Reactions to a Schema-discrepant Event: A Developmental Analysis of Surprise , 1999 .

[73]  Jordi Vallverdú,et al.  Handbook of Research on Synthetic Emotions and Sociable Robotics: New Applications in Affective Computing and Artificial Intelligence , 2009 .

[74]  Stefanie I. Becker,et al.  Oculomotor Capture by New and Unannounced Color Singletons during Visual Search , 2015, Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics.

[75]  T. Ribot,et al.  La Psychologie Des Sentiments , 2015 .

[76]  Rainer Reisenzein,et al.  The Role of Surprise in the Attribution Process , 1995 .

[77]  Gernot Horstmann,et al.  The time course of intended and unintended allocation of attention , 2006, Psychological research.

[78]  Derek Partridge,et al.  Surprisingness and Expectation Failure: What's the Difference? , 1987, IJCAI.

[79]  Boris Egloff,et al.  Increased or reversed? The effect of surprise on hindsight bias depends on the hindsight component. , 2009, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[80]  W. Wundt,et al.  Vorlesungen über die menschen- und tierseele , 1921 .

[81]  I. Ritov,et al.  Decision Affect Theory: Emotional Reactions to the Outcomes of Risky Options , 1997 .

[82]  Rainer Reisenzein,et al.  Emotions as metarepresentational states of mind: Naturalizing the belief–desire theory of emotion , 2009, Cognitive Systems Research.

[83]  F. Heider.  The psychology of interpersonal relations , 1958 .

[84]  S. Tomkins.  Illuminating and Stimulating. (Book Reviews: Affect, Imagery, Consciousness. vol. 1, The Positive Affects) , 1963 .

[85]  K. Bartsch,et al.  Children's and adults' everyday talk about surprise , 1997 .

[86]  Michael B. Lewis,et al.  Exploring the positive and negative implications of facial feedback. , 2012, Emotion.

[87]  B. Weiner.  "Spontaneous" causal thinking. , 1985, Psychological bulletin.

[88]  Rainer Reisenzein,et al.  Facial expressions in response to a highly surprising event exceeding the field of vision: a test of Darwin's theory of surprise , 2012 .

[89]  Andrew Ortony,et al.  The Cognitive Structure of Emotions , 1988 .

[90]  Arvid Herwig,et al.  Surprise attracts the eyes and binds the gaze , 2014, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.

[91]  G. Horstmann,et al.  Coherence between Emotion and Facial Expression: Evidence from Laboratory Experiments , 2013 .

[92]  A. Cardoso,et al.  Modeling Forms of Surprise in an Artificial Agent , 2001 .

[93]  P. Johnson-Laird,et al.  Towards a Cognitive Theory of Emotions , 1987 .

[94]  B. Weiner.  An attributional theory of achievement motivation and emotion. , 1985, Psychological review.

[95]  D. Rumelhart.  Schemata and the cognitive system. , 1984 .

[96]  P. Ekman.  Universals and cultural differences in facial expressions of emotion. , 1972 .

[97]  Bruce Bowe.  The Face of Emotion , 1985 .

[98]  Gideon Keren,et al.  When are successes more surprising than failures? , 2002 .

[99]  Udo Rudolph,et al.  Temporal characteristics of the surprise reaction induced by schema-discrepant visual and auditory events , 1994 .

[100]  D. Cicchetti.  Emotion and Adaptation , 1993 .

[101]  Luís Macedo,et al.  A Contrast-Based Computational Model of Surprise and Its Applications , 2019, Top. Cogn. Sci..

[102]  Sascha Topolinski,et al.  Corrugator activity confirms immediate negative affect in surprise , 2015, Front. Psychol..

[103]  Kevin Burns,et al.  Surprise is predicted by event probability, outcome valence, outcome meaningfulness, and gender , 2014 .

[104]  Karin Ackermann,et al.  Categories and Concepts , 2003, Job 28. Cognition in Context.

[105]  J. Greenberg,et al.  Toward an integration of cognitive and motivational perspectives on social inference: A biased hypothesis-testing model , 1987 .

[106]  Joseph P. Forgas,et al.  The Message Within : The Role of Subjective Experience In Social Cognition And Behavior , 2000 .

[107]  Adnan Darwiche,et al.  Modeling and Reasoning with Bayesian Networks , 2009 .

[108]  S. Hochreiter,et al.  REINFORCEMENT DRIVEN INFORMATION ACQUISITION IN NONDETERMINISTIC ENVIRONMENTS , 1995 .

[109]  Guido H. E. Gendolla,et al.  Surprise in the Context of Achievement: The Role of Outcome Valence and Importance , 1997 .

[110]  Kenneth Hugdahl,et al.  Cognition and the autonomic nervous system: Orienting, anticipation, and conditioning. , 2000 .

[111]  D. Stahlberg,et al.  The Role of Surprise in Hindsight Bias: A Metacognitive Model of Reduced and Reversed Hindsight Bias , 2007 .

[112]  Mahesh M. Desai,et al.  Surprise : a historical and experimental study , 1939 .