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Poster C in Poster Session C: Wednesday, August 5, 9:30 – 11:15 am, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Subjective surprise is encoded in high-level visual representations of magic tricks

Monica Thieu¹; ¹University of San Diego

Presenter: Monica Thieu

Surprise is an emotion associated with expectation violation and ambiguous valence. While computations of prediction error and belief updating are well-characterized, it remains unclear how subjective surprise is ultimately computed from perceptual information. Here, we used visual neural networks to characterize fMRI responses to videos of subjectively surprising magic tricks. We found that surprise was predicted by visual features across the brain, including in regions previously implicated in different components of surprise processing. Meanwhile, event boundaries corresponding to magic reveal moments could not be recovered consistently from visual-related BOLD features. These results characterize the high-level visual substrates of subjective surprise beyond expectation violation alone.

Topic Area: Computational Models of Vision & Visual Cortex