Abstract
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Merging recent surprise theories renders the prediction that
surprise is a function of how strong an event deviates from what was
expected and of how easily this event can be integrated into the
constraints of an activated expectation. The present research
investigates the impact of both these factors on the behavioral,
affective, experiential, and cognitive surprise responses. In two
experiments (total N = 1,257), participants were instructed that ten
stimuli of a certain type would appear on the screen. Crucially, we
manipulated the degree of deviance of the last stimulus by showing a
stimulus that deviated to either no, a medium, or a high degree from the
previous nine stimuli. Orthogonally to this deviation, we induced an
expectation with either high, moderate, or low constraints prior to the
experimental task. We measured behavioral response delay and explicit
ratings of liking, surprise, and expectancy. Our findings point out an
overall only low association between the behavioral, affective,
experiential, and cognitive surprise responses and reveal rather
dichotomous response patterns that differentiate between deviance and
non-deviance of an event. Challenging previous accounts, the present
evidence further implies that surprise is not about the ease of
integrating an event with the constraints of an explicit a-priori
expectation but rather reflects the automatic outcome of implicit
discrepancy detection, resulting from a continuous cognitive fine-tuning
of expectations.