Surprise

About: Surprise is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4371 publications have been published within this topic receiving 99386 citations.

Being surprised and surprising ourselves: A geography of personal and social change.

Abstract: Surprises are refuted expectations and therefore an inevitable concomitant of errors of anticipating the future. This paper argues that the timing is just right for a spatial account of surprise, or rather, for a geography of personal and social change that deploys the trope of surprise to help explain how and why change happens. Whether we are surprised by what transpires in our surroundings or we are surprising ourselves by leaping forward in impetuous deeds of reinventing who we are, the common denominator of these processes of becoming is that they produce geographical space and are produced by it.

Seeing through Symbols: The Case of Equivalent Expressions.

Abstract: While going through the research literature on learning and teaching algebra, one is often reminded of the old story about a person who knew a dozen of languages but remained silent all his life just because he had nothing to say in any of them. Time and time again, researchers tell us about students who, even if quite proficient in manipulating algebraic symbols, do not seem able to use formulas as tools for meaningful communication. In particular, mastery of the rules of syntax is only rarely accompanied by an ability to justify these rules. The following excerpt from a conversation with a twelve-year-old student who had just completed an introduction to algebra is not likely to surprise an experienced teacher (I is the interviewer; Gi is the student):

An Overview of EBMT

Abstract: In the last ten to fifteen years there has been a significant amount of research in Machine Translation within a ‘new’ paradigm of empirical approaches, often labelled collectively as ‘Example-based’ approaches. The first manifestation of this approach caused some surprise and hostility among observers more used to different ways of working, but the techniques were quickly adopted and adapted by many researchers, often creating hybrid systems. This paper reviews the various research efforts within this paradigm reported to date, and attempts a categorisation of different manifestations of the general approach. This paper first appeared in 1999 in Machine Translation 14:113-157. It has been updated with a small number of revisions, and references to more recent work.

Balancing New against Old Information: The Role of Puzzlement Surprise in Learning

Abstract: Surprise describes a range of phenomena from unexpected events to behavioral responses. We propose a novel measure of surprise and use it for surprise-driven learning. Our surprise measure takes into account data likelihood as well as the degree of commitment to a belief via the entropy of the belief distribution. We find that surprise-minimizing learning dynamically adjusts the balance between new and old information without the need of knowledge about the temporal statistics of the environment. We apply our framework to a dynamic decision-making task and a maze exploration task. Our surprise-minimizing framework is suitable for learning in complex environments, even if the environment undergoes gradual or sudden changes, and it could eventually provide a framework to study the behavior of humans and animals as they encounter surprising events.

Functional neuroanatomy of perceiving surprised faces.

Abstract: Surprise is one of six emotions having a specific and universally recognized facial expression. Functional imaging and neuropsychologic studies have uncovered partly separable neural substrates for perceiving different facial expressions; however, the functional neuroanatomy of perceiving surprised faces has not yet been investigated. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we aimed to identify the neural substrate of surprise perception from facial expressions. Based on the assumption of unexpectedness and novelty as elicitors of facial surprise reactions, we hypothesized recruitment of medial temporal lobe structures implicated in novelty detection during the perception of surprise in others. Healthy subjects were scanned while they were presented with surprised faces. As a control, they viewed faces depicting neutral or disgust expressions. Activations during the emotional conditions were contrasted with each other and with the neutral face condition. Compared to both control conditions, perception of surprised facial expressions yielded consistently increased signals in the parahippocampal region, an area associated previously with novelty detection. Our findings therefore suggest a close relation between perceiving surprise in others and the response to novel events. Additionally, we confirmed activation of the insula during perception of disgust expressions.