Summary: Researchers recorded brain activity and eye movements of basketball fans watching March Madness games to examine how people experience and respond to surprise.
Source: Princeton
The gasp at an unexpected play. Fans rising from their seats. The collective shout that follows a dramatic twist. These visceral reactions capture a basic human response: surprise. In sports, surprise is an abrupt shift in expectations that changes how observers anticipate the outcome.
James Antony, a neuroscientist at Princeton, used the intense, quantifiable moments in college basketball to explore how the brain detects and processes surprise during real-world events.
“We want to understand how people update their interpretation of ongoing events as new information arrives — how they form predictions from context and what happens when those predictions are confirmed or violated,” said Antony, a CV Starr Fellow in Neuroscience and lead author on a paper published in the journal Neuron.
The team studied 20 self-identified basketball fans as they watched the final five minutes of nine games from the 2012 men’s NCAA March Madness tournament. While participants viewed the games inside an fMRI scanner, a specialized camera recorded their eye movements and pupil responses. Basketball was chosen because frequent scoring creates many natural, objectively measurable shifts in win probability, offering repeated instances of surprise to study.
“This work matters both for theory and for broad public interest,” said Ken Norman, the paper’s senior author and Huo Professor in Computational and Theoretical Neuroscience. “Sports events like the NCAA tournament are highly engaging and also readily quantifiable — you can compute, moment-by-moment, how likely a particular outcome is given prior events. That makes them an ideal real-world testbed for studying cognitive processes such as memory, event segmentation, and affective responses.”
At moments that produced surprise — a key turnover, a last-second three-pointer — participants typically showed rapid pupil dilation together with detectable shifts in neural activity patterns in higher-order brain regions such as the prefrontal cortex.
Antony emphasized that surprises are not all the same. “Different kinds of surprise produced distinct effects across brain systems,” he said. “It’s not a single uniform signal.”
A notable finding was that large shifts in neocortical activity patterns occurred primarily when the game event contradicted viewers’ prevailing beliefs about which team was most likely to win. “This supports the idea that these brain patterns reflect the narrative of the game, and that the story’s chapters are defined by which team seems to have momentum at a given time,” Norman explained.
To quantify surprise, the researchers worked with statistician Ken Pomeroy to generate win-probability graphs that estimate each team’s chance of winning at every moment of the game. These analytics allowed the team to treat surprise as a measurable change in win probability. The investigators found that avid fans appear to carry an intuitive version of such a win-probability graph in their heads, which explains their strong emotional reactions during pivotal plays.
“When the internal win-probability estimate shifts sharply in either direction, people remember that moment better, and we see corresponding changes in pupil size,” Norman said. The study linked surprise not only to memory and pupillary responses but also to activity in subcortical regions associated with dopamine signaling and to reported game enjoyment.
Previous laboratory studies of surprise have relied on simplified, tightly controlled paradigms that deliberately create and then violate expectations. The novelty of this research lies in bringing those theoretical predictions into a naturalistic setting where surprise is embedded in a rich, meaningful context.
“One of the long-standing questions in neuroscience is whether principles derived from simplified lab tasks hold up in real life,” Norman said. “The difficulty in natural settings is measuring exactly when surprise occurs and how large it is. Sports provide precisely timed, quantifiable instances of surprise, allowing us to test these ideas outside the lab.”
Other members of the research team included Uri Hasson, professor of psychology and neuroscience; Thomas Hartshorne, a researcher with the Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing; and Sam McDougle, who completed his Ph.D. in psychology at Princeton and is now an assistant professor at Yale.
About this neuroscience research news
Source: Princeton
Contact: Liz Fuller-Wright – Princeton
Image: The image is in the public domain
Original Research: Closed access.
“Behavioral, Physiological, and Neural Signatures of Surprise during Naturalistic Sports Viewing” by James Antony et al., Neuron (2020). DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2020.10.029
Abstract
Behavioral, Physiological, and Neural Signatures of Surprise during Naturalistic Sports Viewing
Highlights
- •Surprise was calculated from changes in win probability as basketball fans watched games
- •Surprising events that opposed current beliefs drove behavioral and neural segmentation of experience
- •Surprise predicted pupil dilation, engagement of dopamine-related regions, and improved memory
- •Sports provide rich, naturalistic stimuli for studying event segmentation and reinforcement learning
Summary
Surprise marks a mismatch between prior expectations and new information. Theories link surprise to emotional responses, enhanced memory formation, and the segmentation of continuous experience into distinct events. Measuring surprise in realistic settings has been challenging because natural events are complex and the timing and magnitude of surprise are hard to quantify. Using advanced basketball analytics to derive precise win-probability changes, the researchers characterized how surprise relates to subjective event boundaries, pupillary responses, neural pattern shifts in neocortex, activation of subcortical regions associated with dopamine, enjoyment of the game, and long-term memory. Crucially, many of these effects depended on whether surprising moments contradicted or reinforced viewers’ dominant beliefs about which team would win. These findings support predictions from event segmentation theory and extend concepts of surprise to dynamic, meaningful real-world experiences such as sports viewing.