Brescia Psychology Undergraduate Honours Theses

Date of Award

Winter 4-20-2024

Program

Psychology

Supervisor

Dr. John Mitchell

Abstract

Attention is a critical mental process that allows individuals to focus on pertinent information and filter out distractors. This study's primary goal was to examine how surprise draws attention, which is significant as it may have an impact on memory and learning. This study examines the influence of surprise on attentional capture, both overt and covert, across different levels of outcome predictability in everyday situations using repeated measures ANOVAs. Building on the concept that unexpected events can trigger heightened alertness and memory encoding, we hypothesized that scenarios with less-known outcomes would elicit a stronger attentional response compared to known and normal predictability conditions. To test this hypothesis, we designed an experimental paradigm where undergraduate university students were exposed to a series of everyday scenarios each with three outcome types: less-known, known, and normal. Participants' overt attention was gauged through timing metrics, while covert attention was assessed using memory recall measures. The three outcome types were rated for surprisingness and differed from one another significantly. This suggests that different ending types differed in their level of surprise significantly. The results also observed significance for increased memory recall with surprise outcomes. This study has the potential to provide valuable insights into enhancing teaching mechanisms through the implementation of surprise in learning modules.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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