Surprising Events Research Articles

Predicting pharmaceutical supply chain disruptions before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Disruptions to the pharmaceutical supply chain (PSC) have negative implications for patients, motivating their prediction to improve risk mitigation. Although data analytics and machine learning methods have been proposed to support the characterization of probabilities to inform decisions and risk mitigation strategies, their application in the PSC has not been previously described. Further, it is unclear how well these models perform in the presence of emergent events representing deep uncertainty such as the COVID-19 pandemic. This article examines the use of data-driven models to predict PSC disruptions before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data on generic drugs from the pharmacy supply chain division of a Fortune 500 pharmacy benefit management firm, we have developed predictive models based on the naïve Bayes algorithm, where the models predict whether a specific supplier or whether a specific product will experience a supply disruption in the next time period. We find statistically significant changes in the relationships of nearly all variables associated with product supply disruptions during the pandemic, despite pre-pandemic stability. We present results showing how the sensitivity, specificity, and false positive rate of predictive models changed with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and show the beneficial effects of regular model updating. The results show that maintaining model sensitivity is more challenging than maintaining specificity and false positive rates. The results provide unique insight into the pandemic's effect on risk prediction within the PSC and provide insight for risk analysts to better understand how surprise events and deep uncertainty affect predictive models.

Influence of surprise on reinforcement learning in younger and older adults.

Surprise is a key component of many learning experiences, and yet its precise computational role, and how it changes with age, remain debated. One major challenge is that surprise often occurs jointly with other variables, such as uncertainty and outcome probability. To assess how humans learn from surprising events, and whether aging affects this process, we studied choices while participants learned from bandits with either Gaussian or bi-modal outcome distributions, which decoupled outcome probability, uncertainty, and surprise. A total of 102 participants (51 older, aged 50-73; 51 younger, 19-30 years) chose between three bandits, one of which had a bimodal outcome distribution. Behavioral analyses showed that both age-groups learned the average of the bimodal bandit less well. A trial-by-trial analysis indicated that participants performed choice reversals immediately following large absolute prediction errors, consistent with heightened sensitivity to surprise. This effect was stronger in older adults. Computational models indicated that learning rates in younger as well as older adults were influenced by surprise, rather than uncertainty, but also suggested large interindividual variability in the process underlying learning in our task. Our work bridges between behavioral economics research that has focused on how outcomes with low probability affect choice in older adults, and reinforcement learning work that has investigated age differences in the effects of uncertainty and suggests that older adults overly adapt to surprising events, even when accounting for probability and uncertainty effects.

Paradoxical boosting of weak and strong spatial memories by hippocampal dopamine uncaging.

The ability to remember changes in the surroundings is fundamental for daily life. It has been proposed that novel events producing dopamine release in the hippocampal CA1 region could modulate spatial memory formation. However, the role of hippocampal dopamine increase on weak or strong spatial memories remains unclear. We show that male mice exploring two objects located in a familiar environment for 5 minutes created a short-term memory (weak) that cannot be retrieved one day later, whereas 10 minutes exploration created a long-term memory (strong) that can be retrieved one day later. Remarkably, hippocampal dopamine elevation during the encoding of weak object location memories (OLMs) allowed their retrieval one day later but dopamine elevation during the encoding of strong OLMs promoted the preference for a familiar object location over a novel object location after 24 hours. Moreover, dopamine uncaging after the encoding of OLMs did not have effect on weak memories whereas on strong memories diminished the exploration of the novel object location. Additionally, hippocampal dopamine elevation during the retrieval of OLMs did not allow the recovery of weak memories and did not affect the retrieval of strong memory traces. Finally, dopamine elevation increased hippocampal theta oscillations, indicating that dopamine promotes the recurrent activation of specific groups of neurons. Our experiments demonstrate that hippocampal dopaminergic modulation during the encoding of OLMs depends on memory strength indicating that hyperdopaminergic levels that enhance weak experiences could compromise the normal storage of strong memories.Significance statement Increased levels of dopamine have been related to cognitive enhancement. Hippocampal dopamine elevation caused by novelty exposure has been proposed as a strategy to enhance memory based on the observation that surprising events create flashbulb memories that are remembered for long time. However, hyperdopaminergic levels could also underlie maladaptive memories, such as non-desired preservation of traumatic experiences. Our experiments show that dopamine elevation in the dorsal hippocampus during the encoding of spatial memories has paradoxical effects, while the enhancement of weak memories allows their retrieval, the dopaminergic modulation of strong memories limits the ability to modify preexisting spatial memories by changes in the environment. We conclude that cognitive enhancement through dopamine boosting must consider diverse aspects of memory formation.

A categorization of observed uses of operational research models for fundamental surprise events: Observations from university operations during COVID-19

Operational research (OR) approaches have been increasingly applied to model resilience to surprise events. To model a surprise event, one must understand its characteristics, which then become parameters, decisions, and/or constraints in the model. This means that these models cannot (directly) handle fundamental surprise events, which are events that could not be defined before they happen. However, OR models may be adapted, improvised, or created during a fundamental surprise event, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, to help respond to it. We provide a categorization of observed uses for how OR models were applied by a university in response to the pandemic, thus helping to understand their role during fundamental surprise events. Our categorization includes the following adaptations: adapting data, adding constraints, model switching, pulling from the modeling toolkit, and creating a new model. Each of these adaptations is formally presented, with supporting evidence gathered through interviews with modelers and users involved in the university response to the pandemic.

Qualitative Research of Robot-Helping Behaviors in a Field Trial

During the previous field study with a robot and its interaction with mall visitors, we observed a surprising event during which a leaflet-distributing robot was abused, although it was subsequently helped by one of its previous abusers. After analyzing 72.25 hours of video data, we identified 47 cases where a robot dropped a leaflet and classified them according to following three criteria: 1) interaction between the potential helper or others with the robot before it dropped the leaflet, 2) the nature of the interaction (abused or not), and 3) whether it was helped. Using the Trajectory Equifinality Model (TEM), we analyzed 19 cases where the robot was helped. We identified the following interaction process that started with individuals who paid attention to the robot, whether they had abusive or non-abusive interactions with it, whether they noticed its failure, and finally whether they helped it. The presence of others encouraged the person to focus on the robot, and the interactions with it led to helping, regardless whether the interaction was abusive. The absence of others when the robot dropped the leaflet encouraged helping. The findings of this study will motivate interaction designs for social robots that can leverage human help.

Predictions about reward outcomes in rhesus monkeys.

Human infants and nonhuman animals respond to surprising events by looking longer at unexpected than expected situations. These looking responses provide core cognitive evidence that nonverbal minds make predictions about possible outcomes and detect when these predictions fail to match reality. We propose that this phenomenon has crucial parallels with the processes of reward prediction error, indexing the difference between expected and actual reward outcomes. Most work on reward prediction errors to date involves neurobiological techniques that cannot be implemented in many relevant populations, so we developed a novel behavioral task to assess monkeys' predictions about reward outcomes using looking time responses. In Study 1, we tested how semi-free-ranging monkeys (n = 210) responded to positive error (more rewards than expected), negative error (less rewards than expected), and a number control. We found that monkeys looked longer at a given reward when it was unexpectedly large or small, compared to when the same quantity was expected. In Study 2, we compared responses in the positive error condition in monkeys ranging from infancy to old age (n = 363), to assess lifespan changes in sensitivity to reward predictions. We found that adolescent monkeys showed heightened responses to unexpected rewards, similar to patterns seen in humans, but showed no changes during aging. These results suggest that monkeys' looking responses can be used to track their predictions about rewards, and that monkeys share some developmental signatures of reward sensitivity with humans, providing a new approach to access cognitive processes underlying reward-based decision making. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Analysis of Multimodal Biosignals during Surprise Conditions Correlates with Psychological Traits

Surprise can simultaneously represent bad or good, pleasant or unpleasant, with the same experiences since understanding how humans' physiological qualities link with their emotional or mental health is required. We conducted quantitative research to concisely correlate mental stress and emotional issues by measuring brain activity, breathing, and heart rate in real time while executing specialized audio-visual stimulation to elicit a surprise event. We evaluated the frequency and temporal domain characteristics to determine if physiological measurements matched biochemical metrics and subjective stress assessments during the elicit surprise condition experiment. We discovered that the brain is still preferable to most in recognizing a human's psychological changes over a short period of time. The temporal (T3) (r = 0.544, p = 0.005) and frontal (Fz) (r = 0.519, p = 0.008) regions were shown to correlate with salivary amylase activity. In comparison to other channels, there was a negative association between stress perception and the occipital site (O1, r = -0.618, p = 0.001). We also found that heart rate variability activity correlates with arousal perception. By looking at specific multimodal biosignals, it is possible to understand human psychological traits by recording specific physiological signals for daily mental health monitoring.

The temporal structure of goal-directed and habitual operant behavior.

Operant behavior can reflect the influence of goal-directed and habitual processes. These can be distinguished by changes to response rate following devaluation of the reinforcing outcome. Whether a response is goal directed or habitual depends on whether devaluation affects response rate. Response rate can be decomposed into frequencies of bouts and pauses by analyzing the distribution of interresponse times. This study sought to characterize goal-directed and habitual behaviors in terms of bout-initiation rate, within-bout response rate, bout length, and bout duration. Data were taken from three published studies that compared sensitivity to devaluation following brief and extended training with variable-interval schedules. Analyses focused on goal-directed and habitual responding, a comparison of a habitual response to a similarly trained response that had been converted back to goal-directed status after a surprising event, and a demonstration of contextual control of habit and goal direction in the same subjects. Across experiments and despite responses being clearly distinguished as goal directed and habitual by total response rate, analyses of bout-initiation rate, within-bout rate, bout length, and bout duration did not reveal a pattern that distinguished goal-directed from habitual responding.

The giant nature of WD 1856 b implies that transiting rocky planets are rare around white dwarfs

ABSTRACT White dwarfs (WDs) have roughly Earth-sized radii – a fact long recognized to facilitate the potential discovery of sub-Earth-sized planets via transits, as well as atmospheric characterization including biosignatures. Despite this, the first (and still only) transiting planet discovered in 2020 was a roughly Jupiter-sized world, found using Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) photometry. Given the relative paucity of giant planets compared to terrestrials indicated by both exoplanet demographics and theoretical simulations (a ‘bottom-heavy’ radius distribution), this is perhaps somewhat surprising. Here, we quantify the surprisingness of this fact accounting for geometric bias and detection bias assuming (1) a bottom-heavy Kepler-derived radius distribution and (2) a top-heavy radial velocity-inspired radius distribution. Both are concerning, with the latter implying that rocky planets are highly unusual and the former implying that WD 1856 b would have to be highly surprising event at the <0.5 per cent level. Using a hierarchical Bayesian model, we infer the implied power-law radius distribution conditioned upon WD 1856 b and arrive at a top-heavy distribution, such that 0.1–2 R⊕ planets are an order-of-magnitude less common than 2–20 R⊕ planets in the period range of 0.1–10 d. The implied hypothesis is that transiting WD rocky planets are rare. We discuss ways to reconcile this with other evidence for minor bodies around WDs, and ultimately argue that it should be easily testable.

Surprise! Draw the scene: Visual recall reveals poor incidental working memory following visual search in natural scenes.

Searching within natural scenes can induce incidental encoding of information about the scene and the target, particularly when the scene is complex or repeated. However, recent evidence from attribute amnesia (AA) suggests that in some situations, searchers can find a target without building a robust incidental memory of its task relevant features. Through drawing-based visual recall and an AA search task, we investigated whether search in natural scenes necessitates memory encoding. Participants repeatedly searched for and located an easily detected item in novel scenes for numerous trials before being unexpectedly prompted to draw either the entire scene (Experiment 1) or their search target (Experiment 2) directly after viewing the search image. Naïve raters assessed the similarity of the drawings to the original information. We found that surprise-trial drawings of the scene and search target were both poorly recognizable, but the same drawers produced highly recognizable drawings on the next trial when they had an expectation to draw the image. Experiment 3 further showed that the poor surprise trial memory could not merely be attributed to interference from the surprising event. Our findings suggest that even for searches done in natural scenes, it is possible to locate a target without creating a robust memory of either it or the scene it was in, even if attended to just a few seconds prior. This disconnection between attention and memory might reflect a fundamental property of cognitive computations designed to optimize task performance and minimize resource use.

Location of Emergency Treatment Sites after Earthquake using Hybrid Simulation

A mass-casualty natural disaster such as an earthquake is a rare, surprising event that is usually characterized by chaos and a lack of information, resulting in an overload of casualties in hospitals. Thus, it is very important to refer minor and moderately-injured casualties, that are the majority of casualties and whose injuries are usually not life threatening, to ad hoc care facilities such as Emergency Treatment Sites (ETSs). These facilities support the efficient use of health resources and reduce the burden on permanent healthcare facilities. In our study, a hybrid simulation model, based on a combination of discrete events and an agent-based simulation, provides a solution to the uncertainty of positioning temporary treatment sites. The simulation methodology used compares between "rigid" and "flexible" operating concepts of ETSs (main vs. main+minor ETSs) and found the "flexible" concept to be more efficient in terms of the average walking distance and number of casualties treated in the disaster area.

Long-term, multi-event surprise correlates with enhanced autobiographical memory.

Neurobiological and psychological models of learning emphasize the importance of prediction errors (surprises) for memory formation. This relationship has been shown for individual momentary surprising events; however, it is less clear whether surprise that unfolds across multiple events and timescales is also linked with better memory of those events. We asked basketball fans about their most positive and negative autobiographical memories of individual plays, games and seasons, allowing surprise measurements spanning seconds, hours and months. We used advanced analytics on National Basketball Association play-by-play data and betting odds spanning 17 seasons, more than 22,000 games and more than 5.6 million plays to compute and align the estimated surprise value of each memory. We found that surprising events were associated with better recall of positive memories on the scale of seconds and months and negative memories across all three timescales. Game and season memories could not be explained by surprise at shorter timescales, suggesting that long-term, multi-event surprise correlates with memory. These results expand notions of surprise in models of learning and reinforce its relevance in real-world domains.

Blaming yourself, your partner, or an unexpected event: Attribution biases and trust in a physical coordination task

AbstractAs robots enabled by artificial intelligence become more agentic, people may come to develop trust schemas based on a robot's actions and attribute blame to the robot as they would with a human partner. Trust and blame have yet to be investigated during dynamic physical coordination tasks despite the potential ramifications for manufacturing and service industries that could benefit from effective human–robot physical coordination. In anticipation of future human–robot work configurations, we developed a joint physical coordination task as a preliminary test environment for understanding trust and blame in a work partner. Fifty‐five participants were asked to jointly balance and transport a weighted box along a fixed path, and we used this test environment to evaluate the impact of a surprising event on trust in a work partner, and attribution of blame following a negative performance outcome. Results indicate that the group who experienced a surprising event compared to the group who did not trusted their partner more, but there was no difference in the attribution of blame to themselves, their partner, or to the surprising event. Conversely, the group who did not experience a surprising event tended to blame themselves for the negative outcome. These findings suggest that environmental uncertainty may prompt people's attribution of blame across multiple parties, including themselves. Moreover, people may build trust in work partners through the shared experience of surprising events. Future work would benefit from adopting our study design to investigate whether these findings are extendable to human–robot joint actors.

Slipping through the cracks: The peril of unexpected interruption on the contents of working memory.

Working memory allows us to hold specific pieces of information in an active and easily retrieved state, but what happens to that information during an unexpected interruption between study and test? To answer this question, we used a surprise trial paradigm in which an unexpected event precedes a probe of the observer's memory for a search target. In the first set of experiments, participants were tasked to report the identity of the target letter before unexpectedly being asked to read a task-irrelevant passage. We observed that the introduction of this passage interfered with the observer's memory of the target letter, but this interference only occurred after participants had experience completing the task without interruption. However, a remember cue placed just prior to the reading prompt reduced this cost, suggesting that participants can rapidly reinforce information about the target in working memory to resist the interference. We then used this same cuing manipulation to test whether information in an attribute amnesia paradigm, which unexpectedly probes an attribute relevant to target selection but irrelevant to participant's response expectations, could also be protected against unexpected interference. Using this paradigm, we observed that a remember cue did not improve performance following the surprising event, which supports theories that attribute amnesia is not caused solely by interference. These results reveal both the vulnerability and flexibility of working memory and demonstrate the importance of understanding how task experience establishes expectations that impact the underlying cognitive representations formed by the observer. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The Effects of Surprising Events on Promoting Social Change in Unwinnable Persuasive Games

Surprising events can be beneficial for unwinnable persuasive games, especially since they can evoke players to reflect on their failure to win the game. Despite its presence in some titles, the usage of surprising events still lacks empirical support. This study aims to gain insight into it by comparing the effects of revealing the game’s context from the beginning to delaying it until the game ends. In addition, we also examine the interaction effects with playing duration since it is possible that longer playtime will lead to smaller effects for a game with surprising events, whereas longer playtime will result in greater effects for a game without surprising events. To do so, we conducted a 2 x 2 factorial between-subject experiment with an additional no-treatment control group. The results suggest that delaying the revelation to create a surprising event can promote the same level of donation from players, regardless of their playing time. On the other hand, longer playtime is important if players know the context from the beginning. Additional results about the effect of playing duration on donation and willingness to help were also discussed in this paper.

Organizational Adaptive Capacity during a Large-Scale Surprise Event: A Case Study at an Academic Institution during the COVID-19 Pandemic

OCCUPATIONAL APPLICATIONS The COVID-19 pandemic caused large organizations and institutions to adapt their decision-making procedures and hierarchical structures to address pandemic-specific concerns. By examining a large public university, we found that effective adaptation occurred through restructuring the decision-making processes, coordinating decisions between departments, and effective monitoring of prior decisions. When considering the COVID-19 pandemic as a fundamental surprise event, our work identified strategies and decision-making that both maintained and increased adaptive capacity through the course of such an event. Through this case study, we highlight decisions that can be made by similar large organizations, to increase adaptive capacity when they are faced with similar surprise events.

Samoocena a samopoczucie uczniów w okresie pandemii

Introduction: The coronavirus pandemic as a sudden, surprising event, evoking strong emotions and disorganizing life should be analyzed as a crisis event. How young people experience a crisis depends on how they give meaning and importance to the event (positive–negative–ambivalent, important–unimportant) and their subjective level of mental strain. Research goal: This article presents the authors’ own research on the levels of self-esteem and school well-being in students during the COVID-19 pandemic and the relationship between these variables. The research was conducted online among seventh and eighth-grade students of primary schools and first-grade students of secondary schools in the Lubelskie Voivodeship. Method: A diagnostic survey was used in the research. Results: The vast majority of the surveyed students have high and medium levels of self-esteem. Gender, age, and grade significantly differentiated self-esteem. As a result of over year-long social isolation caused by the coronavirus epidemic, the well-being of the surveyed students gradually deteriorated. The obtained results indicate there is a relationship between the surveyed students’ self-esteem and their well-being at school before and during the pandemic. Conclusions: It is necessary to provide psychological and pedagogical support to all students, regardless of their current mental condition. In addition, systemic solutions should be introduced, which, on the one hand, will prepare educational institutions and entities responsible for this process during remote and hybrid work in the best possible way, and on the other hand, they will help to maintain the balance between teaching and upbringing supported by prevention.

Impact of Temporary Browsing Restrictions on Drivers’ Situation Awareness When Interacting with In-Vehicle Infotainment Systems

Looking away from the road during a task degrades situation awareness of potential hazards. Long glances back to the road rebuild this awareness and are thought to be critical for maintaining good vehicle control and recognizing conflicts. To further investigate the importance of rebuilding situation awareness, a controlled test-track study was performed that evaluated drivers’ hazard awareness and response performance to a surprise event after completing a task that involved pausing partway through it to look back at the road. Thirty-two drivers completed a visual-manual infotainment system secondary task. Half of the drivers were instructed to pause their browsing mid-task, while the others were not. While the task was being performed, a lead vehicle activated its hazard lights. It then unexpectedly dropped a fake muffler once drivers completed the task. Drivers’ visual attention to the road and their ability to respond to the muffler were measured. The drivers that paused their browsing were more aware of the lead vehicle’s hazard lights, showed less surprise to the dropped muffler, and executed more measured avoidance maneuvers compared to the drivers that did not pause their browsing. These findings suggest that drivers’ situation awareness can be better maintained when task interactions are paced, allowing for longer monitoring of the environment. Mechanisms that encourage drivers to take restorative on-road glances during extended browsing may be a key aspect of an overall approach to mitigating driver distraction.

Experience-driven recalibration of learning from surprising events

Different environments favor different patterns of adaptive learning. A surprising event that in one context would accelerate belief updating might, in another context, be downweighted as a meaningless outlier. Here, we investigated whether people would spontaneously regulate the influence of surprise on learning in response to event-by-event experiential feedback. Across two experiments, we examined whether participants performing a perceptual judgment task under spatial uncertainty (n = 29, n = 63) adapted their patterns of predictive gaze according to the informativeness or uninformativeness of surprising events in their current environment. Uninstructed predictive eye movements exhibited a form of metalearning in which surprise came to modulate event-by-event learning rates in opposite directions across contexts. Participants later appropriately readjusted their patterns of adaptive learning when the statistics of the environment underwent an unsignaled reversal. Although significant adjustments occurred in both directions, performance was consistently superior in environments in which surprising events reflected meaningful change, potentially reflecting a bias towards interpreting surprise as informative and/or difficulty ignoring salient outliers. Our results provide evidence for spontaneous, context-appropriate recalibration of the role of surprise in adaptive learning.

Arranged Marriages and Imprisonment: The Domestic Gothic Horrors of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s La baronesa de Joux (1844) and Dolores (1851)

Cuban writer Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814–73) produced a number of texts that show clear Gothic characteristics as part of Hispanic Romanticism in the mid-nineteenth century. Utilizing La baronesa de Joux and Dolores, two of her tradiciones (traditions), which are stories or short novels with fantastic elements, I examine how Gómez de Avellaneda employs techniques and tropes associated with women’s Gothic writing to communicate proto-feminist messages and to reveal the potential dangers of marriage and domesticity. The stories are set in medieval castles, incorporate features such as spirits, patriarchal violence, malaise, and incarceration and have not been previously analyzed using theoretical approaches associated with female Gothic writing popularized by critics such as Anne K. Mellor and Abigail Lee Six. Through these tradiciones with Gothic features, Gómez de Avellaneda details surprising events and questions societal norms for women’s roles in matrimony.