Triangulating Surprise: Expectations, Uncertainty, and Making Sense

Surprise is a ubiquitous phenomenon that both draws on cognition and affects cognition, in a number of different ways. For example, in artificial intelligence an agent in a changing and imperfectly-known environment has been argued to need a surprise mechanism to survive. This symposium brings together researchers in education, computer science, cognitive psychology, and business to explore the relationship between surprise and cognition, and how it might be harnessed across domains. We will open with a touchstone challenge: How can surprising information be recruited to promote learning? (Munnich & Ranney) Then we will explore several perspectives on surprise, ranging from violation of expectations created through repetition (Loewenstein) to a focus on the information content of surprising events (Maguire & Maguire), to the apparently conflicting roles surprise may play in judgment (May, Smith-Rodden, & Ash). Our final speakers (Foster & Keane) will synthesize these approaches, and present a broad framework for future research on surprise within the cognitive sciences.