Surprise
Chapter 1 - Worldview
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Welcome to the Surprise page
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Surprise 'motivates' your motivation
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Theories of motivation, particularly of intrinsic motivation, place novelty and surprise among the primary factors that:
- arouse interest,
- motivate exploratory or avoidance behavior,
- and drive learning.
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Key take-aways from the deep dive
- When your expectations are not met (positively or negatively), you feel surprised
- With observations that surprises you, you update your model of the world in a Bayesian way, in other words, in relation to what you already 'knew'
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Deep dive
Surprise
There is wide agreement that surprise is an emotion arising from a mismatch between an expectation and what is actually observed or experienced.
Surprise requires a mechanism for comparing an expectation with actuality.
According to the most straightforward view, expectations are representations of the values that some perceptual features are likely to assume in the future.
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Bayesian updates
In the Bayesian framework, probabilities, which correspond to prior (subjective) beliefs, are updated as new observations are made using Bayes’ theorem to convert prior beliefs into posterior beliefs. What we call Bayesian surprise is a measure of the difference between an observer’s prior and posterior beliefs. The core element here is the fact that you already have a model, a belief about the world around you.
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