Behavioral, Physiological, and Neural Signatures of Surprise during Naturalistic Sports Viewing

Surprise signals a discrepancy between past and current beliefs. It is theorized to be linked to affective experiences, the creation of particularly resilient memories, and segmentation of the flow of experience into discrete perceived events. However, the ability to precisely measure naturalistic surprise has remained elusive. We used advanced basketball analytics to derive a quantitative measure of surprise and characterized its behavioral, physiological, and neural correlates in human subjects observing basketball games. We found that surprise was associated with segmentation of ongoing experiences, as reflected by subjectively perceived event boundaries and shifts in neocortical patterns underlying belief states. Interestingly, these effects differed by whether surprising moments contradicted or bolstered current predominant beliefs. Surprise also positively correlated with pupil dilation, activation in subcortical regions associated with dopamine, game enjoyment, and long-term memory. These investigations support key predictions from event segmentation theory and extend theoretical conceptualizations of surprise to real-world contexts. •Surprise was derived via win probability changes as basketball fans watched games•Surprise opposing current beliefs predicted behavioral and neural event segmentation•Surprise predicted pupil dilation, activity in dopamine-related regions, and memory•Sports are rich, naturalistic stimuli for studying events and reinforcement learning Antony et al. derive a model tracking surprise during naturalistic basketball viewing and find many links to behavioral, physiological, and neural measures, including predicted changes in neural patterns. Their findings test and support key ideas in event segmentation theory and provide face validity for multiple laboratory findings about surprise.