{"pk":28308,"title":"Modeling dynamics of suspense and surprise","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Activities such as watching a sports match and reading a novel often provoke suspense and surprise (S&S). Computation-ally, we hypothesize that these feelings derive from the dynamics of our beliefs. In our experiment, participants watch realvideotaped volleyball games or play a card game, where their belief dynamics (e.g. chance of winning) can be affected byboth the stimuli and background information (e.g. game rules and prior beliefs about the teams / the card deck). FollowingEly et al (2015) we formalize instantaneous suspense as a function of expected variance in future belief, and surprise asrelated to the magnitude of belief changes. Through probabilistic model we generate point-by-point predictions of S&S.We find that ratings of S&S for the same games depend on experimentally manipulated in qualitative agreement with ourmodel, but we also identify several situations where the model fails.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Abstracts-Posters","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/30p2d194","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Zhiwei","middle_name":"","last_name":"Li","name_suffix":"","institution":"New York University","department":""},{"first_name":"Neil","middle_name":"","last_name":"Bramley","name_suffix":"","institution":"New York University","department":""},{"first_name":"Todd","middle_name":"","last_name":"Gureckis","name_suffix":"","institution":"New York University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2018-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28308/galley/17981/download/"}]}