Experience-driven recalibration of learning from surprising events

Different environments favor different patterns of adaptive learning. A surprising event that in one context would accelerate belief updating might, in another context, be downweighted as a meaningless outlier. Here, we investigated whether people would spontaneously regulate the influence of surprise on learning in response to event-by-event experiential feedback. Across two experiments, we examined whether participants performing a perceptual judgment task under spatial uncertainty (n = 29, n = 63) adapted their patterns of predictive gaze according to the informativeness or uninformativeness of surprising events in their current environment. Uninstructed predictive eye movements exhibited a form of metalearning in which surprise came to modulate event-by-event learning rates in opposite directions across contexts. Participants later appropriately readjusted their patterns of adaptive learning when the statistics of the environment underwent an unsignaled reversal. Although significant adjustments occurred in both directions, performance was consistently superior in environments in which surprising events reflected meaningful change, potentially reflecting a bias towards interpreting surprise as informative and/or difficulty ignoring salient outliers. Our results provide evidence for spontaneous, context-appropriate recalibration of the role of surprise in adaptive learning.