ArticleNature human behaviour2023
Long-term, multi-event surprise correlates with enhanced autobiographical memory.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 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.
The trial behind it
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
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Contrast bias, not confirmation bias, shapes daily impression updating across social and non-social targets.The British journal of social psychology · 2026Article
- A dynamic affective surprise signal influences episodic memory.Cognition · 2026Article
- Self-serving biases shape the relationship between future thinking and remembering of elections.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Signatures of reinforcement learning in natural behavior.Current directions in psychological science · 2025Article
- Schemas, reinforcement learning and the medial prefrontal cortex.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Accurate Predictions Facilitate Robust Memory Encoding Independently From Stimulus Probability.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Article
- The causal structure and computational value of narratives.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2024Review
- Collective events and individual affect shape autobiographical memory.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Neurobiological and psychological models of learning emphasize the importance of prediction errors (surprises) for memory formation. This relationship has been shown for individual momentary surprising events; however, it is less clear whether surprise that unfolds across multiple events and timescales is also linked with better memory of those events. We asked basketball fans about their most positive and negative autobiographical memories of individual plays, games and seasons, allowing surprise measurements spanning seconds, hours and months. We used advanced analytics on National Basketball Association play-by-play data and betting odds spanning 17 seasons, more than 22,000 games and more than 5.6 million plays to compute and align the estimated surprise value of each memory. We found that surprising events were associated with better recall of positive memories on the scale of seconds and months and negative memories across all three timescales. Game and season memories could not be explained by surprise at shorter timescales, suggesting that long-term, multi-event surprise correlates with memory. These results expand notions of surprise in models of learning and reinforce its relevance in real-world domains.
Indexed as
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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.