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Though the scientific study of surprise dates back to Darwin (), there was an upsurge in interest beginning in the 1960s and 70s, and this has continued to the present. Recent developments have shed much light on the cognitive mechanisms and consequences of surprise, but research has often been siloed within sub‐areas of Cognitive Science. A central challenge for research on surprise is, therefore, to connect various research programs around their overlapping foci. This issue has its roots in a symposium on surprise, entitled "Triangulating Surprise: Expectations, Uncertainty, and Making Sense," at the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (Quebec City, July 2014). Building on the interdisciplinary conversations that started at the symposium, this issue aims to draw attention to some promising empirical and modeling results and their theoretical implications. The present paper sets the stage for the issue by presenting a historical summary, discussing contrasting definitions of surprise, and then by tracing major threads that run through both this issue and the larger literature on surprise. Our aim is to develop broader, shared understandings of the main insights, theories, and findings regarding surprise, with a view to supporting future integration and progress. This special issue presents developments in research on the cognitive mechanisms and consequences of surprise. Amidst much progress, surprise research has often been siloed, so, as editors, we have sought to juxtapose insights, theories, and findings, to support cross‐fertilization in future research. The present paper sets the stage by presenting a historical summary, highlighting contrasts in definitions, and tracing major threads running through this issue and the larger surprise literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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). This paper discusses the Metacognitive Explanation Based (MEB) theory, that surprise stems from a metacognitive assessment of the cognitive work necessary to make sense of outcomes. The authors discuss two predictions of MEB, 1. reviewing past evidence that the most difficult outcomes to explain are the most surprising; 2. discussing evidence from a new study demonstrating that surprising outcomes are more memorable than less‐surprising outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early theories of surprise, including Darwin’s, argued that it was predominantly a basic emotion. Recently, theories have taken a more cognitive view of surprise, casting it as a process of “making sense of surprising events”. The current paper advances the view that the essence of this sense-making process is explanation ; specifically, that people’s perception of surprise is a metacognitive estimate of the cognitive work involved in explaining an abnormal event. So, some surprises are more surprising because they are harder to explain. This proposal is tested in eight experiments that explore how (i) the contents of memory can influence surprise, (ii) different classes of scenarios can retrieve more/less relevant knowledge from memory to explain surprising outcomes, (iii) how partial explanations constrain the explanation process, reducing surprise, and (iv) how, overall, any factor that acts to increase the cognitive work in explaining a surprising event, results in higher levels of surprise (e.g., task demands to find three rather than one explanations). Across the present studies, using different materials, paradigms and measures, it is consistently and repeatedly found that the difficulty of explaining a surprising outcome is the best predictor for people’s perceptions of the surprisingness of events. Alternative accounts of these results are considered, as are future directions for this research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]