An experimental analysis of surprise

Meyer, Wulf‐Uwe; Niepel, Michael; Rudolph, Udo; Schützwohl, Achim

doi:10.1080/02699939108411042

Cited by 136 publications

(189 citation statements)

References 15 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

165

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…The role of task-expectancies in determining the allocation of cognitive resources is supported by experimental evidence demonstrating numerous physiological and behavioral changes in response to unexpected events (Asplund, Todd, Snyder, Gilbert, & Marois, 2010;Becker & Horstmann, 2011;Czigler, Weisz, & Winkler, 2006;Forster & Lavie, 2011;Horstmann, 2002Horstmann, , 2005Horstmann, , 2006Horstmann & Becker, 2008;Kazmerski & Friedman, 1995;Meyer et al, 1991;Neo & Chua, 2006;Niepel et al, 1994;Retell, Becker, & Remington, 2015;Schützwohl, 1998). For example, Meyer et al (1991) had participants respond to the location of a dot that appeared briefly (0.1 s) either above or below two vertically arranged words.…”

mentioning

confidence: 87%

“…A key component of the surprise response is the orienting of attention toward the inducing stimulus (Horstmann, 2005;Meyer et al, 1991). In Experiment 1 we showed across four conditions that the first presentation of an invalid motion distractor produced RT inference.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Prediction errors signal that there is new information in the environment and the system responds by interrupting ongoing processes and devoting attentional resources to process this new information. This process is presumed to underlie the subjective impression of surprise (Meyer et al, 1991;Niepel, Rudolph, Schűtzwohl, & Meyer, 1994;Meyer, Reisenzein, & Schűtzwohl, 1997). Once an unexpected stimulus has been reconciled and incorporated into a schema it will no longer elicit surprise as it is no longer expectation discrepant (Niepel et al, 1994).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Using the same paradigm as Meyer et al (1991), Schűtzwohl (1998) varied the number of pre-critical trials between 3, 13, 23, and 33 to modulate the strength of stimulus expectations prior to exposure to the surprising stimulus. In line with the predictions, the effect of the "surprise" stimulus varied across the four conditions.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, Meyer et al (1991) had participants respond to the location of a dot that appeared briefly (0.1 s) either above or below two vertically arranged words. For the first 29 pre-critical trials of the experiment the words appeared as black against a white background.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

Previously seen and expected stimuli elicit surprise in the context of visual search

Retell

Becker

Remington

2016

Atten Percept Psychophys

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In the context of visual search, surprise is the phenomenon by which a previously unseen and unexpected stimulus exogenously attracts spatial attention. Capture by such a stimulus occurs, by definition, independent of task goals and is thought to be dependent on the extent to which the stimulus deviates from expectations. However, the relative contributions of prior-exposure and explicit knowledge of an unexpected event to the surprise response have not yet been systematically investigated. Here observers searched for a specific color while ignoring irrelevant cues of different colors presented prior to the target display. After a brief familiarization period, we presented an irrelevant motion cue to elicit surprise. Across conditions we varied prior exposure to the motion stimulusseen versus unseen -and top-down expectations of occurrence -expected versus unexpected -to assess the extent to which each of these factors contributes to surprise. We found no attenuation of the surprise response when observers were pre-exposed to the motion cue and or had explicit knowledge of its occurrence. Our results show that it is neither sufficient nor necessary that a stimulus be new and unannounced to elicit surprise and suggest that the expectations that determine the surprise response are highly context specific.Keywords Visual search . Surprise . Attentional capture There is more information present in any given visual scene than the human cognitive system is capable of fully processing at any one point in time. A challenge for the human visual system then is to construct a stable and functional percept of the world from only a select subset of the available visual input. Mechanisms of selective attention allow us to prioritize the processing of certain visual input so that our conscious percept is one constructed from information in the environment that is functionally pertinent. How these selection mechanisms are controlled and the information they are sensitive to has important consequences for how we interact with our environment. In everyday life, the visual system is frequently challenged to decide whether to attend to information that is relevant to our immediate goals or to prioritize signals that might be unexpected and signal a threat.Much of the debate in the literature over attentional control has focused on the nature of control of the exogenous attentional system -a system that reflexively shifts the focus of attention to signals of potential importance in the environment. At issue is the degree to which bottom-up factors, namely stimulus saliency, automatically capture attention and to what degree top-down, namely task goals, modulate the effect of salient stimuli (Jonides & Yantis, 1988;Lamy & Kristjánsson, 2013;Leber & Egeth, 2006;Müller, Geyer, Zehetleitner, & Krummenacher, 2009;Posner, 1980;Remington, Johnston, & Yantis, 1992;Shomstein, 2012;Theeuwes, 1991Theeuwes, , 2010Yantis & Jonides, 1984). Previous studies investigating orienting, especially in natural scenes, suggest that salience may i...

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 87%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Previously seen and expected stimuli elicit surprise in the context of visual search

Retell

Becker

Remington

2016

Atten Percept Psychophys

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Verbal probabilities: a question of frame?

Teigen

Brun

2002

Behavioral Decision Making

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Verbal expressions of probability and uncertainty are of two kinds: positive ('probable', 'possible') and negative ('not certain', 'doubtful'). Choice of term has implications for predictions and decisions. The present studies show that positive phrases are rated to be more optimistic (when the target outcome is positive), and more correct, when the target outcome actually occurs, even in cases where positive and negative phrases are perceived to convey the same probabilities (Experiments 1 and 2). Selection of phrase can be determined by linguistic frame. Positive quantifiers ('some', 'several') support positive probability phrases, whereas negative quantifiers ('not all') suggest negative phrases (Experiment 3). Positive frames induced by numeric frequencies (e.g. the number of students to be admitted) imply positive probability phrases, whereas negative frames (e.g. the number of students to be rejected) call for negative probability phrases (Experiment 4). It is concluded that choice of verbal phrase is based not only on level of probability, but also on situational and linguistic cues.

show abstract

Blaming yourself, your partner, or an unexpected event: Attribution biases and trust in a physical coordination task

Hsiung

León

Stinson

et al. 2023

Hum Ftrs & Erg Mfg Svc

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

As robots enabled by artificial intelligence become more agentic, people may come to develop trust schemas based on a robot's actions and attribute blame to the robot as they would with a human partner. Trust and blame have yet to be investigated during dynamic physical coordination tasks despite the potential ramifications for manufacturing and service industries that could benefit from effective human–robot physical coordination. In anticipation of future human–robot work configurations, we developed a joint physical coordination task as a preliminary test environment for understanding trust and blame in a work partner. Fifty‐five participants were asked to jointly balance and transport a weighted box along a fixed path, and we used this test environment to evaluate the impact of a surprising event on trust in a work partner, and attribution of blame following a negative performance outcome. Results indicate that the group who experienced a surprising event compared to the group who did not trusted their partner more, but there was no difference in the attribution of blame to themselves, their partner, or to the surprising event. Conversely, the group who did not experience a surprising event tended to blame themselves for the negative outcome. These findings suggest that environmental uncertainty may prompt people's attribution of blame across multiple parties, including themselves. Moreover, people may build trust in work partners through the shared experience of surprising events. Future work would benefit from adopting our study design to investigate whether these findings are extendable to human–robot joint actors.

show abstract

An experimental analysis of surprise

Cited by 136 publications

References 15 publications

Previously seen and expected stimuli elicit surprise in the context of visual search

Previously seen and expected stimuli elicit surprise in the context of visual search

Verbal probabilities: a question of frame?

Blaming yourself, your partner, or an unexpected event: Attribution biases and trust in a physical coordination task

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About