Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Suspense is an affective state that contributes to our enjoy-ment of experiences such as movies and sports. Ely, Frankel,and Kamenica (2015) proposed a formal definition of suspensewhich depends on the variance of subjective future beliefsabout an outcome of interest (e.g., winning a game). In orderto evaluate this theory, we designed a task based on the cardgame Blackjack where a variety of suspense dynamics can beexperimentally induced. By presenting participants with iden-tical sequences of information (i.e., card draws), but manip-ulating contextual knowledge (i.e., their understanding of therules of the game) we were able to show that self-reported sus-pense follows the predictions of the model. Follow-up modelcomparison further showed an advantage for the “suspense asvariance of future beliefs” account over a number of alterna-tive definitions of suspense, including some that depend onlyon current uncertainty (not the future). This paper is an initialattempt to link aspects of formal models of information anduncertainty with affective cognitive states.