{"pk":24633,"title":"The Role of Surprise in Memory: Assessing the Impact of Levels of Surprise on Children's Episodic Memory","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Expectations play a critical role in children's learning. Prior studies suggest that children selectively focus on and better remember details of expectation-violating events (Stahl & Feigenson, 2017; 2019). Yet, it remains unclear whether this enhanced memory persists across varying degrees (e.g., somewhat vs. very surprising) and types of expectation violations (core-knowledge vs. schema-based violations). Adapting a surprise storybook paradigm from Foster and Keane (2019), we measure children's (5-8 years; N=20) surprise and recognition memory for six stories that span different expectation-related domains and contain outcomes that are expectation-congruent, somewhat expectation-violating, or completely violating. While preliminary data revealed no significant difference in recognition accuracy by level of surprise, a trend towards better memory for violations of well-entrenched versus schema-based expectations was observed. This preliminary work points to potential differences in how varying types of expectations influence memory in young children and has important implications for learning.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Education; Psychology; Cognitive development; Learning; Memory"}],"section":"Abstracts","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3jw8n7vk","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Carla","middle_name":"","last_name":"Macias","name_suffix":"","institution":"RUTGERS UNIVERSITY-NEWARK","department":""},{"first_name":"Kimele","middle_name":"","last_name":"Persaud","name_suffix":"","institution":"RUTGERS UNIVERSITY-NEWARK","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2024-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24633/galley/21651/download/"},"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24633/galley/14230/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24633/galley/18008/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24633/galley/21651/download/"}]}