ArticlePsychonomic bulletin & review2022
The limited reach of surprise: Evidence against effects of surprise on memory for preceding elements of an event.
Article in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Contextual cues do not facilitate spontaneous face recognition.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2026Article
- Hippocampal mismatch signals are based on episodic memories and not schematic knowledge.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Schema-driven prediction effects on episodic memory across the lifespan.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Neural Activity Differentiates Novel and Learned Event Boundaries.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Disentangling emotional source memory: a mega-analysis on the effects of emotion on item-context binding in episodic long-term memory.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- False memories for ending of events.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2023Article
- Predictions transform memories: How expected versus unexpected events are integrated or separated in memory.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2023Review
- Article
- Novel immersive virtual reality experiences do not produce retroactive memory benefits for unrelated material.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2022Article
- Effect of button layout on the exploration and learning of robot operation using an unfamiliar controller.PloS one · 2022Article
- A predictive account of how novelty influences declarative memory.Neurobiology of learning and memory · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
When reflecting on the past, some of our strongest memories are for experiences that took us by surprise. Extensive research has backed this intuition that we are more likely to remember surprising moments than mundane ones. But what about the moments leading up to the surprise? Are we more likely to remember those as well? While surprise is a well-established modulator of memory, it is unknown whether memory for the entire event will be enhanced, or only for the surprising occurrence itself. We developed a novel paradigm utilising stop-motion films, depicting of a sequence of narrative events, in which specific occurrences could be replaced with surprising ones, while keeping the rest of the film unaltered. Using this design, we tested whether surprise exerts retroactive effects on memory, and specifically whether any potential effect would be confined to elements in the same event as the surprising occurrence. In a large cohort of participants (n = 340), we found strong evidence that surprise did not retroactively modulate memory, neither when participants were tested immediately after study nor when they were tested 24 hours later. We suggest two possible accounts for these findings: (1) that the components of an event are encoded as independent episodic elements (not as a cohesive unit), or (2) that surprise segments experience, sectioning off the preceding elements as a separate event.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.