School of Computer Science and Informatics, University College Dublin.
Top Cogn Sci. 2019 Jan;11(1):75-87. doi: 10.1111/tops.12392. Epub 2018 Oct 29.
Surprise has been explored as a cognitive-emotional phenomenon that impacts many aspects of mental life from creativity to learning to decision-making. In this paper, we specifically address the role of surprise in learning and memory. Although surprise has been cast as a basic emotion since Darwin's () The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, recently more emphasis has been placed on its cognitive aspects. One such view casts surprise as a process of "sense making" or "explanation finding": metacognitive explanation-based theory proposes that people's perception of surprise is a metacognitive assessment of the cognitive work done to explain a surprising outcome. Or, to put it more simply, surprise increases with the explanatory work required to resolve it. This theory predicts that some surprises should be more surprising than others because they are harder to explain. In the current paper, this theory is extended to consider the role of surprise in learning as evidenced by memorability. This theory is tested to determine how scenarios with differentially surprising outcomes impact the memorability of those outcomes. The results show that surprising outcomes (less-known outcomes) that are more difficult to explain are recalled more accurately than less-surprising outcomes that require little (known outcomes) or no explanation (normal).
惊讶已被探索为一种认知情感现象，它影响着从创造力到学习再到决策等心理生活的许多方面。在本文中，我们特别探讨了惊讶在学习和记忆中的作用。尽管自达尔文的《人类和动物的表情》以来，惊讶一直被视为一种基本情绪，但最近人们更加关注它的认知方面。有一种观点将惊讶视为一种“意义建构”或“解释寻找”的过程：元认知基于解释的理论提出，人们对惊讶的感知是对解释令人惊讶的结果所做的认知工作的元认知评估。或者，更简单地说，随着解决它所需的解释性工作的增加，惊讶感也会增加。该理论预测，一些惊讶应该比其他惊讶更令人惊讶，因为它们更难解释。在当前的论文中，该理论被扩展到考虑惊讶在学习中的作用，这可以从可记性中得到证明。该理论被用来确定具有不同惊讶结果的场景如何影响这些结果的可记性。结果表明，与需要很少（已知结果）或不需要解释（正常）的惊讶结果相比，更难解释的令人惊讶的结果（鲜为人知的结果）的记忆准确性更高。
