Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T23:29:28.520Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Surprise as an ideal case for the interplay of cognition and emotion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 June 2015

Meadhbh I. Foster
Affiliation:
School of Computer Science & Informatics, University College, Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland. [email protected]@ucd.iehttp://www.csi.ucd.ie/users/meadhbh-isobel-mckay-fosterhttp://www.csi.ucd.ie/users/mark-keane
Mark T. Keane
Affiliation:
School of Computer Science & Informatics, University College, Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland. [email protected]@ucd.iehttp://www.csi.ucd.ie/users/meadhbh-isobel-mckay-fosterhttp://www.csi.ucd.ie/users/mark-keane

Abstract

The target article is a timely exposition on the impact of how emotion and cognition interact, a specifically important issue in surprise research. Psychologists debate whether disconfirmed expectations or sense-making processes determine surprise levels experienced for an event. We posit that, in surprise, cognition and emotion are intertwined, making it an interesting test case for the proposals in this article.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Belova, M. A., Paton, J. J., Morrison, S. E. & Salzman, C. D. (2007) Expectation modulates neural responses to pleasant and aversive stimuli in primate amygdala. Neuron 55(6):970–84.Google Scholar
Coulson, S. & Kutas, M. (2001) Getting it: Human event-related brain response to jokes in good and poor comprehenders. Neuroscience Letters 316:7174.Google Scholar
Darwin, C. R. (1872) The expression of the emotions in man and animals. John Murray.Google Scholar
Donchin, E. (1981) Surprise!..Surprise? Psychophysiology 18(5):493513.Google Scholar
Eddy, M., Schmid, A. & Holcomb, P. J. (2006) Masked repetition priming and event-related brain potentials: A new approach for tracking the time-course of object perception. Psychophysiology 43(6):564–68.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ekman, P. & Friesen, W. (1971) Constants across cultures in the face and emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 17(2):124–29.Google Scholar
Ferrari, V., Bradley, M. M., Codispoti, M. & Lang, P. J. (2010) Detecting novelty and significance. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 22(2):404–11.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Foster, M. I. & Keane, M. T. (2013) Surprise! You've got some explaining to do. In: Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, ed. Knauff, M., Pauen, M., Sebanz, N. & Wachsmuth, I., pp. 2321–26. Cognitive Science Society.Google Scholar
Foster, M. I. & Keane, M. T. (under review) Why some surprises are more surprising than others: Surprise as a metacognitive sense of explanatory difficulty.Google Scholar
Hayden, B. Y., Heilbronner, S. R., Pearson, J. M. & Platt, M. L. (2011) Surprise signals in anterior cingulate cortex: Neuronal encoding of unsigned reward prediction errors driving adjustment in behavior. The Journal of Neuroscience 31(11):4178–87.Google Scholar
Heider, F. (1958) The psychology of interpersonal relations. John Wiley.Google Scholar
Holland, P. C. & Gallagher, M. (2006) Different roles for amygdala central nucleus and substantia innominata in the surprise-induced enhancement of learning. The Journal of Neuroscience 26(14):3791–97.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Izard, C. (1977) Human emotions. Plenum Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, R. (1986) A triarchic model of P300 amplitude. Psychophysiology 23(4):367–84.Google Scholar
Kahneman, D. & Miller, D. T. (1986) Norm theory: Comparing reality to its alternatives. Psychological Review 93(2):136–53.Google Scholar
Keil, A., Bradley, M. M., Hauk, O., Rockstroh, B., Elbert, T. & Lang, P. J. (2002) Large-scale neural correlates of affective picture processing. Psychophysiology 39(5):641–49.Google Scholar
Keil, F. C. (2006) Explanation and understanding. Annual Reviews of Psychology 57:227–54.Google Scholar
Kok, A. (2001) On the utility of P3 amplitude as a measure of processing capacity. Psychophysiology 38:557–77.Google Scholar
Kopp, B. & Lange, F. (2013) Electrophysiological indicators of surprise and entropy in dynamic task-switching environments. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7:300.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kutas, M. & Federmeier, K. D. (2000) Electrophysiology reveals semantic memory use in language comprehension. Trends in Cognitive Science 4(12):463–70.Google Scholar
Lin, S. C. & Nicolelis, M. A. (2008) Neuronal ensemble bursting in the basal forebrain encodes salience irrespective of valence. Neuron 59(1):138–49.Google Scholar
Lombrozo, T. & Carey, S. (2006) Functional explanation and the function of explanation. Cognition 99(2):167204.Google Scholar
Macedo, L. (2010) The practical advantage of surprise-based agents (Extended Abstract). In: Proceedings of the ninth international conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems, ed. van der Hoek, W., Kaminka, G. A., Lesperance, Y., Luck, M. & Sen, S., pp. 1401–402. IFAMAS.Google Scholar
Maguire, R. & Keane, M. T. (2006) Surprise: Disconfirmed expectations or representation-fit? In: Proceedings of the 28th annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society, ed. Son, R., pp. 531–36. Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Maguire, R., Maguire, P. & Keane, M. T. (2011) Making sense of surprise: An investigation of the factors influencing surprise judgments. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 37(1):176–86.Google Scholar
Meyer, W. U., Reisenzein, R. & Schützwohl, A. (1997) Toward a process analysis of emotions: The case of surprise. Motivation and Emotion 21(3):251–74.Google Scholar
Ortony, A. & Turner, T. J. (1990) What's basic about basic emotions? Psychological Review 97(3):315–31.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pearce, J. M. & Hall, G. (1980) A model for Pavlovian learning: Variations in the effectiveness of conditioned but not of unconditioned stimuli. Psychological Review 87(6):532.Google Scholar
Pessoa, L. (2013) The cognitive-emotional brain. From interactions to integration. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Pezzo, M. V. (2003) Surprise, defence, or making sense: What removes hindsight bias? Memory 11(4/5):421–41.Google Scholar
Plutchik, R. (1991) The emotions. University Press of America.Google Scholar
Ranganath, C. & Rainer, G. (2003) Neural mechanisms for detecting and remembering novel events. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 4(3):193202.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Reisenzein, R. & Studtmann, M. (2007) On the expression and experience of surprise: No evidence for facial feedback, but evidence for a reverse self-inference effect. Emotion 7(3):601–11.Google Scholar
Roesch, M. R., Esber, G. R., Li, J., Daw, N. D. & Schoenbaum, G. (2012) Surprise! Neural correlates of Pearce–Hall and Rescorla–Wagner coexist within the brain. European Journal of Neuroscience 35(7):1190200.Google Scholar
Schützwohl, A. & Reisenzein, R. (1999) Children's and adult's reactions to a schema-discrepant event: A developmental analysis of surprise. International Journal of Behavioral Development 23(1):3762.Google Scholar
Sutton, S., Braren, M., Zubin, J. & John, E. R. (1965) Evoked potential correlates of stimulus uncertainty. Science 150:1187–88.Google Scholar
Teigen, K. H. & Keren, G. (2002) When are successes more surprising than failures? Cognition and Emotion 16(2):245–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Teigen, K. H. & Keren, G. (2003) Surprises: Low probabilities or high contrasts? Cognition 87(2):5571.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tomkins, S. S. (1962) Affect, imagery, consciousness, vol. 1. Springer.Google Scholar
Wessel, J. R., Danielmeier, C., Morton, J. B. & Ullsperger, M. (2012) Surprise and error: Common neuronal architecture for the processing of errors and novelty. The Journal of Neuroscience 32(22):7528–37.Google Scholar
Yeung, N. & Sanfey, A. G. (2004) Independent coding of reward magnitude and valence in the human brain. The Journal of Neuroscience 24(28):6258–64.Google Scholar