Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.