We all know what surprise feels like, but a computer model has now defined the concept. It is the change in expectation caused by the arrival of new data, it says. The model uses an aptly named unit of measurement - the "wow".rnPierre Baldi at the University of California, Irvine, and Laurent Itti at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles devised the model while investigating human attention.rnA dominant theory from the 1950s has it that the amount of attention we pay to an object or event is linked to the volume of information our brains need to form an understanding of it. For example, our attention should hover over intricate patterns longer than over a plain surface.
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