Surprising Events Research Articles

Fear of the unknown: uncertain anticipation reveals amygdala alterations in childhood anxiety disorders.

Children with anxiety disorders (ADs) experience persistent fear and worries that are highly debilitating, conferring risk for lifelong psychopathology. Anticipatory anxiety is a core clinical feature of childhood ADs, often leading to avoidance of uncertain and novel situations. Extensive studies in non-human animals implicate amygdala dysfunction as a critical substrate for early life anxiety. To test specific amygdala-focused hypotheses in preadolescent children with ADs, we used fMRI to characterize amygdala activation during uncertain anticipation and in response to unexpected stimuli. Forty preadolescent (age 8-12 years) children, 20 unmedicated AD patients and 20 matched controls completed an anticipation task during an fMRI scan. In the task, symbolic cues preceded fear or neutral faces, such that 'certain' cues always predicted the presentation of fear or neutral faces, whereas 'uncertain' cues were equally likely to be followed by fear or neutral faces. Both AD children and controls showed robust amygdala response to faces. In response to the uncertain cues, AD children had increased amygdala activation relative to controls. Moreover, in the AD children, faces preceded by an 'uncertain' cue elicited increased amygdala activation, as compared with the same faces following a 'certain' cue. Children with ADs experience distress both in anticipation of and during novel and surprising events. Our findings suggest that increased amygdala activation may have an important role in the generation of uncertainty-related anxiety. These findings may guide the development of neuroscientifically informed treatments aimed at relieving the suffering and preventing the lifelong disability associated with pediatric ADs.

Making a World of Difference in Fire and Climate Change

AbstractTogether with other stressors, interactions between fire and climate change are expressing their potential to drive ecosystem shifts and losses in biodiversity. Closely linked to human well-being in most regions of the globe, fires and their consequences should no longer be regarded as repeated surprise events. Instead, we should regard fires as common and enduring components of most terrestrial systems, including their social context. At the global scale, too much fire and the wrong kinds of fire are trumping not enough fire as the most influential fire problems we must address. Intensified fire suppression and government prohibition of burning is not a long-term solution at the global scale. Acknowledging the importance of programs to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, I propose that fire ecologists come together to elevate attention on four less-discussed priorities: ecological systems in which people depend on fire for survival and well-being; systems in which governments unwisely insist on command and control approaches to fire; places where peatlands are burning; and, places where climate-driven changes in fire will cause type conversion. Finally, I propose holding a worldwide fire summit to debate these priorities and to create fire management goals at the global scale. Taken all together, these proposed steps could enable fire ecologists to mount a worldwide offensive to shape the future of fire in the era of climate change.

Intrinsic motivations and open-ended development in animals, humans, and robots: an overview.

Intrinsic motivations and open-ended development in animals, humans, and robots: an overview.

Object permanence in marine mammals using the violation of expectation procedure

Object permanence refers to the ability to process information about objects even when they are not visible. One stage of object permanence, called visible displacement, involves being able to find an object that has been fully hidden from view. Visible displacement has been demonstrated in many animal species, yet very little is known about object permanence in marine mammals. In addition, the methodology for testing visible displacement has sometimes been called into question because alternative explanations could account for subjects’ success. The current study investigated visible displacement in Atlantic bottlenose dolphins and California sea lions using a methodology called violation of expectation, in which the animal's fish bucket was placed on a table surrounded on three sides by curtains. A solid screen placed in front of the bucket was then rotated in an arc from front to back. The screen was rotated either 120° (possible event) or 180° (surprising event), appearing as if the bucket disappeared. Both dolphins and sea lions looked significantly longer during the 180°, unexpected, trials than the expected event trials. Results suggest that both dolphins and sea lions pass visible displacement tests without the use of perceptual cues.This article is part of a Special Issue entitled: Tribute to Tom Zentall.

When does repetition suppression depend on repetition probability?

When does repetition suppression depend on repetition probability?

Can believable characters act unexpectedly?

Unexpectedness is a major factor controlling interest in narratives. Emotions, for instance, are felt intensely if they are associated with unexpected events. The problem with generating unexpected situations is that either characters, or the whole story, are at risk of being no longer believable. This issue is one of the main problems that make story design a hard task. Writers face it on a case by case basis. The automatic generation of interesting stories requires formal criteria to decide to what extent a given situation is unexpected and to what extent actions are kept believable. This paper proposes such formal criteria and makes suggestions concerning their use in story generation systems. 1. The unexpectedness-believability dilemma Interest in narratives crucially relies on the author’s ability to design unexpected situations. The exercise requires however a bit of caution, as the following example illustrates. The Knife Story. John and Mary are true lovers. Over time, their love is growing. On that Tuesday, Mary has breakfast with John as usual. She stands up, goes to the kitchen, grabs a knife, returns and stabs John in the back. This example illustrates the mutual exclusion between unexpectedness and believability. Mary’s action does not make sense at this point of the story. Readers are in a desperate need for an explanation that will restore Mary’s rationality. In the absence of such explanation, or if it comes too late, Mary’s character is at risk of appearing non believable, and the story’s attractiveness will suffer as a result. Few authors addressed the issue on a general basis. The narrative generator Prevoyant (Bae and Young, 2008) is an attempt to generate flashback and foreshadowing, specifically targeted at the evocation of surprise in the reader’s mind. Surprise is mainly aroused by the manipulation of temporal structures in the narrative. Foreshadowing provides the reader with expectations and flashback provides the reader with an explanation of the surprising event. Using a reader model, the system evaluates both the presence of an unexpected event and the fact that the story structure as a whole will hang together and make sense to the reader. Suspenser (Cheong and Young, 2008) is a framework that determines narrative contents intended to arouse high level of suspense in the reader. This system relies on the idea that a reader’s suspense level is affected by the problems that characters must face and by the number of solutions available to them. The system manipulates the story events in order to increase or decrease the chances of success and also proposes a measure of the level of suspense. Both studies, Prevoyant and Suspenser, address the question of generating coherent stories that arouse an effect in the reader. However, the problem of creating interesting situations by generating surprise or suspense is addressed considering only some specific aspect of these notions. No general theoretical framework that would serve as guidance for the generation of interesting and believable narratives is provided.Reconciling unexpectedness and believability is generally considered as a skill that often makes the difference between good and average quality fiction. The automatic generation of interesting stories requires some formal criterion to decide to what extent a given situation is unexpected and whether actions are kept believable. The aim of this paper is to offer such a formal criterion and to show how it could be implemented in story generation systems. In what follows, we will first illustrate with an example (the Grail Story) how unexpectedness is used by authors to raise interest. They often bring characters to the frontiers of believability. To reproduce this skill, a theoretical framework is needed. We consider such a framework, Simplicity Theory, in a further section. After a brief presentation of the theory, we will show how it can be used to formally characterize two notions: surprise and intentionality. Thanks to these definitions, we will be able not only to express the unexpectedness-believability dilemma, but also to get around it. We will then go further, showing how the theoretical definitions can lead to practical calculus and, eventually, could be used in story generation systems.

Neuromodulation by surprise: a biologically plausible model of the learning rate dynamics

Surprise is a central concept in learning, attention and the study of the neural basis of behaviour. However, how surprise affects learning and more specifically, how surprise affects synaptic learning rules in neural networks is largely undetermined. Here we study how surprise facilitates learning in different environments and how surprise can potentially modulate Hebbian learning in the form of a global factor in multi-factor learning rules. Learning rate is a crucial factor in determining to what extent the learning agent should rely on the newly acquired information rather than the old information in building its own internal model of the external world. Both theory and empirical evidences suggest that the learning rate should be adjusted under different circumstances for having an optimal and effective learning strategy. We propose a simple and biologically plausible model that describes the dynamics of the learning rate in terms of surprise and uncertainty measures. We apply our model to three different tasks: a reversal task (Fig. ​(Fig.1),1), a dynamic decision making task, and a dynamic clustering task. Figure 1 Estimation of the probability of reward delivery in a reversal task. A. Estimated reward rate. B. Reward prediction error. C. Surprise measure. D. Learning rate. E. Uncertainty measure. F. Optimal Kalman learner. Our proposed model explains how the agent should effectively control the speed of learning in different environments such that it matches both theory and empirical evidences from human and animal subjects. This model explains why surprising events provoke humans and animals to learn faster and why they rapidly adapt to changing environments. It also addresses the question of what the effective learning rate should be in both stable (either low-risky or high-risky) and volatile environments. Here effectiveness is defined as having a higher accuracy in learning a task, for instance the estimation of the mean reward in classic reinforcement learning, for a given time and computational complexity as well as the available memory as our constraints. This study also suggests a functional connectivity pattern for the neurochemical systems that are related to contextual modulation of learning rate. Further, it explains why we need different neuromodulators with distinct functional roles to act in parallel in a broad range of distribution and proposes suitable candidates responsible for measuring different quantities we need in the model.

Learning Unknown Event Models

Agents with incomplete environment models are likely to be surprised, and this represents an opportunity to learn. We investigate approaches for situated agents to detect surprises, discriminate among different forms of surprise, and hypothesize new models for the unknown events that surprised them. We instantiate these approaches in a new goal reasoning agent (named FoolMeTwice), investigate its performance in simulation studies, and report that it produces plans with significantly reduced execution cost in comparison to not learning models for surprising events.

The promise of security: resilience, surprise and epistemic politics

Over the past decade, resilience has become a quasi-universal answer to problems of security and governance, from climate change to children's education, from indigenous history to disaster response, and from development to terrorism. This article places the proliferation of resilience in relation to the earlier proliferation of security discourse and practice. Why resilience today? It answers this question by unpacking the epistemic regimes that underpin the move to resilience. Rather than tracing the differences between protection, prevention, pre-emption and resilience, the article argues that the political transformation that resilience entails becomes explicit in relation to the promise of security. Although the language of ‘promise’ and ‘promising’ has been widely used in relation to security, its political implications have remained unexplored. Underpinned by an epistemology of surprising events, resilience discourses reconfigure the promise of security. Through an empirical engagement with the tur...

Semantic relation vs. surprise: The differential effects of related and unrelated co-verbal gestures on neural encoding and subsequent recognition

Speech-associated gesturing leads to memory advantages for spoken sentences. However, unexpected or surprising events are also likely to be remembered. With this study we test the hypothesis that different neural mechanisms (semantic elaboration and surprise) lead to memory advantages for iconic and unrelated gestures. During fMRI-data acquisition participants were presented with video clips of an actor verbalising concrete sentences accompanied by iconic gestures (IG; e.g., circular gesture; sentence: “The man is sitting at the round table”), unrelated free gestures (FG; e.g., unrelated up down movements; same sentence) and no gestures (NG; same sentence). After scanning, recognition performance for the three conditions was tested. Videos were evaluated regarding semantic relation and surprise by a different group of participants. The semantic relationship between speech and gesture was rated higher for IG (IG>FG), whereas surprise was rated higher for FG (FG>IG). Activation of the hippocampus correlated with subsequent memory performance of both gesture conditions (IG+FG>NG). For the IG condition we found activation in the left temporal pole and middle cingulate cortex (MCC; IG>FG). In contrast, for the FG condition posterior thalamic structures (FG>IG) as well as anterior and posterior cingulate cortices were activated (FG>NG). Our behavioral and fMRI-data suggest different mechanisms for processing related and unrelated co-verbal gestures, both of them leading to enhanced memory performance. Whereas activation in MCC and left temporal pole for iconic co-verbal gestures may reflect semantic memory processes, memory enhancement for unrelated gestures relies on the surprise response, mediated by anterior/posterior cingulate cortex and thalamico-hippocampal structures.

Reflections on the revolutionary wave in 2011

The “Arab Spring” was a surprising event not just because predicting revolutions is a difficult task, but because current theories of revolution are ill equipped to explain revolutionary waves where interactive causal mechanisms at different levels of analysis and interactions between the units of analysis predominate. To account for such dynamics, a multidimensional social science of revolution is required. Accordingly, a meta-framework for revolutionary theory that combines multiple levels of analysis, multiple units of analysis, and their interactions is offered. A structured example of theory building is then given by detailing how the development of world cultural models and practices challenge existing political structures, affect mobilization processes, and make diffusion more likely. A structured example of study design using qualitative comparative analysis of 16 Middle Eastern and North African countries provides support for the interaction of subnational conditions for mobilization, state-centered causes, and transnational factors, including a country’s linkage to world society, as one explanation of the Revolutions of 2011.

On the meaning of the special-cause variation concept used in the quality discourse – And its link to unforeseen and surprising events in risk management

In quality management, ‘common-cause variation’ and ‘special-cause variation’ are key concepts used to control and improve different types of processes. In this paper we study the meaning of these concepts, having a special focus on the latter concept: how is the special-cause concept linked to ideas and concepts used in risk and uncertainty management, to reflect unforeseen and surprising events? In the quality discourse it is common to refer to two possible mistakes when confronting the variation: (i) to react to an outcome as if it were from a special cause, when actually it came from common causes of variation; and (ii) to treat an outcome as if it were from common causes of variation, when actually it came from a special cause. However, at the point of decision making it is difficult or impossible to know what the “true” state is. It is also appropriate to ask whether such a true state does in fact exist. In the paper we discuss these issues, the main aim of the paper being to improve our understanding of some of the fundamental concepts used in risk and quality management.

The European financial crisis - a challenge for ten-year German government bond yield forecasts?

The global financial crisis and European sovereign debt crisis did have major impacts on the whole European monetary union as well as on interest rates at the short and long end of the yield curve. In the case of Germany the flight to quality effect did have substantially impact on long term government bond yields. These to some extent surprising events might have been puzzling for professional interest rate forecasters as well. In order to investigate the quality survey predictions during the financial crisis and European sovereign debt crisis it will be tested for long-run relationships, for structural breaks in these relations as well as for short run dynamics.

Of Elections and Emeritus Memberships

The balloting for the 2013 RRA elections has now been completed. Your voting yielded the following outcomes: Jack Marcum was elected President for a term that begins in 2015. He became Vice-President at the end of this year’s annual meeting. Mary Gautier and Melinda Lundquist Denton were elected to 4-year terms on the RRA Board of Directors. They also took office at the end of this year’s annual meeting. Conrad Hackett and Robert Woodberry were elected to the Nominating Committee and will begin their work with the election of 2014. On behalf of the RRA membership I want to congratulate all of these individuals and extend our appreciation to everyone who agreed to stand for election, as well as to Nominations Chair Elaine Howard Ecklund and those who worked with her. Finding well-qualified persons who are willing to accept nomination is not the easiest job in RRA. On another front, the Executive Office had quite a surprising event as dues rolled in this year, inasmuch as a number of people declared themselves Emeritus members and paid Emeritus dues. Some also included generous contributions, for which we are grateful. Others did not. This matter apparently needs to be set straight formally, so that it is included in that part of our institutional printed record that goes to all members: The RRA By-Laws revision of 1995 ended the category of Emeritus membership, but the Board also recognized at that time that this honor had been bestowed on a number of individuals and stated that those persons who held this status prior to 1995 would retain it for the remainder of their active lives in the RRA. The only RRA members who now hold this status are David O. Moberg and Everett L. Perry. We wish them both long and productive lives, but once they have gone to their rewards, that is the end of Emeritus membership in the RRA. In the future, these Emeritus members will be sent separate dues notices to avoid this confusion.

Lesions to the prefrontal performance-monitoring network disrupt neural processing and adaptive behaviors after both errors and novelty

Unexpected events can have internal causes (action errors) as well as external causes (perceptual novelty). Both events call for adaptations of ongoing behavior, resulting, amongst other things, in post-error and post-novelty slowing (PES/PNS) of reaction times (RT). Both types of events are processed in prefrontal brain areas, indexed by event-related potentials (ERPs): Errors are followed by a complex of ERPs comprised of the error-related negativity (ERN) and error positivity (Pe), whereas novels are followed by a N2/P3 complex. However, despite those overlapping properties, past neuroscientific studies of both types of events resulted in largely separate branches of research. Only recently have theoretical efforts proposed overlapping neuronal networks for the computation of ‘unexpectedness’ in general. Crucially, in a recent study, we have shown that both errors and novelty are indeed processed in the same neuronal network in the human brain: the prefrontal-cingulate performance-monitoring network (PCMN) underlying the ERN also explained significant parts of the N2/P3 complex.Here, we attempt to take this research further by investigating the causal role of the PCMN in both error and novelty processing. Eight patients with ischemic lesions to the PCMN and eight control participants performed a version of the flanker task in which they made errors, while also being presented with unexpected action effects on a subset of otherwise correct trials.In line with our predictions, lesions to the PCMN lead to significant reductions in ERP amplitude following both errors and perceptual novelty. Also, while the age-matched control participants showed the expected pattern of adaptive RT slowing to both errors and novelty, patients did not exhibit adaptive slowing behaviors following either event. These results support recent theoretical accounts according to which a general PCMN reacts to surprising events, regardless of valence and/or source of the unexpectedness.

ATTENDO

An experiment was carried out to develop and to validate a new assessment method for the allocation of visual attention in complex displays with two kinds of information: information about the environment of the system and additional information about the system status. Based on a secondary-task approach, this method specifically allows for an evaluation of possible consequences the design of complex displays may have on pilots’ or operators’ visual behavior, thus facilitating the identification of inappropriate designs that may lead to cognitive tunneling. A number of methods to evaluate the impact of design on pilots’ or operators’ visual attention are already in existence. They all apply the detection of surprising events. Experiments using these methods, however, require a large number of participants. The new method presented here helps overcome this problem and reduce the necessary effort. It is based on a secondary target-detection task with targets presented in different locations of the field of view. The experiment conducted to validate the new method was designed for the application of the method in two-dimensional displays (ATTENDO, which is Latin for I pay attention). The method is capable to reproduce effects of complex design on the allocation of attention. A significant better detection rate for centrally localized targets is achieved.

A Contextualized Transactive Memory System View on How Founding Teams Respond to Surprises: Evidence from China

Entrepreneurs in emerging economies face not only more opportunities but also heightened levels of uncertainties than their peers in developed economies. They, therefore, frequently encounter surprising events arising from rapid and chaotic environmental changes. Extant research, however, provides only sketchy accounts regarding how founding teams respond to surprises. In this study, we propose that founding teams' transactive memory systems (TMS) situated in the unique contextual conditions prevalent in most emerging economies will affect their perceptions regarding how to bridge the knowledge gaps arising from surprises. We test our hypotheses with survey data collected from 137 start‐ups in China. Our results suggest that in emerging economies where market supporting institutions are deficient, founding teams with strong TMSs are less inclined to acquire external knowledge but are more prone to improvise in response to surprises than founding teams with weak TMSs. Negative surprises seem to strengthen the above relationships. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of this study. Copyright © 2013 Strategic Management Society.

Dissociable effects of surprise and model update in parietal and anterior cingulate cortex.

Brains use predictive models to facilitate the processing of expected stimuli or planned actions. Under a predictive model, surprising (low probability) stimuli or actions necessitate the immediate reallocation of processing resources, but they can also signal the need to update the underlying predictive model to reflect changes in the environment. Surprise and updating are often correlated in experimental paradigms but are, in fact, distinct constructs that can be formally defined as the Shannon information (IS) and Kullback-Leibler divergence (DKL) associated with an observation. In a saccadic planning task, we observed that distinct behaviors and brain regions are associated with surprise/IS and updating/DKL. Although surprise/IS was associated with behavioral reprogramming as indexed by slower reaction times, as well as with activity in the posterior parietal cortex [human lateral intraparietal area (LIP)], the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) was specifically activated during updating of the predictive model (DKL). A second saccade-sensitive region in the inferior posterior parietal cortex (human 7a), which has connections to both LIP and ACC, was activated by surprise and modulated by updating. Pupillometry revealed a further dissociation between surprise and updating with an early positive effect of surprise and late negative effect of updating on pupil area. These results give a computational account of the roles of the ACC and two parietal saccade regions, LIP and 7a, by which their involvement in diverse tasks can be understood mechanistically. The dissociation of functional roles between regions within the reorienting/reprogramming network may also inform models of neurological phenomena, such as extinction and Balint syndrome, and neglect.

Dutch and Australian Planning Regimes: Are They Ready to Face Extreme Climate Impacts?

In this study, Dutch and Australian planning regimes are examined to determine whether they are ready to face climate extremes. Five different “cultural” facets of spatial planning determine the differences between the two regimes. These planning characteristics are first confronted with current climate change. The Dutch planning regime performs better under these conditions than the Australian. Secondly, a suite of spatial scenarios is confronted with both current change and a changed risk landscape, in which climate extremes are introduced. Again, the performance of planning characteristics to deal with these new vulnerabilities is tested. For type-1 impacts, exaggerating current change, a limited number of Dutch planning characteristics still hold, where the majority of Australian planning properties is likely to lose functionality. Under type-2 impacts, surprising climate events, the Dutch approach is no longer sufficient, while some Australian characteristics suddenly imply opportunities. The sectored planning approach, together with culturally determined individual responses, might prove to offer solace, under the condition that dealing with extreme events is made priority. Overall, current regimes face difficulties in dealing with surprising climate events and a fundamentally different planning approach is required. Swarm Planning, which dynamically deals with uncertainty, is proposed as a beneficial new planning method.

Playing the Wild Card

Life never quite runs to plan. Just when we think that we can see the road ahead, something turns up to make a mockery of our planning. These unforeseen circumstances can be both good and bad for us. Such are the vagaries of life. These surprises can have a major impact on our lives or they can be fairly minor in effect. We tend to take the minor surprises in our stride, but the more significant ones lead us to a period of reevaluation. In futures literature, surprising events tend to be known as wild card events. They are defined as low-probability, high-impact events that have the potential to completely disrupt our plans for the future. Much of futures work is about anticipating a range of possible futures. We normally call these visions of the future scenarios. When we inject wild card events into our scenario set, we normally call the result a set of wild card scenarios. Their purpose is not to replace the original scenarios but to enhance our understanding of them. In this way, if we play our wild cards right, the future ought not to be as surprising as it could be.