Maguire, Rebecca and Keane, Mark T.
(2005)
Expecting a Surprise? The Effect of Expectations on Perceived Surprise in Stories.
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
pp. 833-838.
ISSN 1069-7977
Abstract
This paper describes two novel experiments that investigate the
cognitive basis of surprise in stories depicting simple, everyday
events. Participants were asked to read a number of short
scenarios, each of which concluded with some surprise event
for the central protagonist. The story versions differed in how
strongly they predicted this ‘surprise’ conclusion, by varying
the degree of attention drawn to key enabling conditions for
that conclusion. The effect of this manipulation on participants’
surprise ratings, and the speed with which they read the final
sentence, were used as dependent measures. The results of our
experiments show that the specific representations built by
people in understanding the earlier part of a story have definite
effects on their level of surprise at later events. Furthermore, the
pattern of reading times for the target sentences supports the
explanation given for these differences. We discuss the
consistency of these findings with theories of discourse
comprehension and describe how such effects might be
modelled computationally.
| Item Type: |
Article
|
| Additional Information: |
Cite as: Grimes-Maguire, R., & Keane, M. T. (2005). Expecting a Surprise? The Effect of Expectations on Perceived Surprise in Stories. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 27. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9kb6k4bh |
| Keywords: |
Discourse Comprehension; Surprise; Expectation; |
| Academic Unit: |
Faculty of Science and Engineering > Psychology |
| Item ID: |
12640 |
| Depositing User: |
Rebecca Maguire
|
| Date Deposited: |
20 Mar 2020 15:55 |
| Journal or Publication Title: |
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society |
| Publisher: |
Cognitive Science Society |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| URI: |
|
| Use Licence: |
This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available
here |
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