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What killed the cat? Towards a logical formalization of curiosity (and suspense, and surprise) in narratives

Florence Dupin de Saint-Cyr, Anne-Gwenn Bosser, Benjamin Callac, Eric Maisel

TL;DR

This work provides a unified framework in which the three emotions at the heart of narrative tension (curiosity, suspense and surprise) are formalized and proposes means to evaluate these emotions' intensity for a given agent listening to a story.

Abstract

We provide a unified framework in which the three emotions at the heart of narrative tension (curiosity, suspense and surprise) are formalized. This framework is built on nonmonotonic reasoning which allows us to compactly represent the default behavior of the world and to simulate the affective evolution of an agent receiving a story. After formalizing the notions of awareness, curiosity, surprise and suspense, we explore the properties induced by our definitions and study the computational complexity of detecting them. We finally propose means to evaluate these emotions' intensity for a given agent listening to a story.

What killed the cat? Towards a logical formalization of curiosity (and suspense, and surprise) in narratives

TL;DR

This work provides a unified framework in which the three emotions at the heart of narrative tension (curiosity, suspense and surprise) are formalized and proposes means to evaluate these emotions' intensity for a given agent listening to a story.

Abstract

We provide a unified framework in which the three emotions at the heart of narrative tension (curiosity, suspense and surprise) are formalized. This framework is built on nonmonotonic reasoning which allows us to compactly represent the default behavior of the world and to simulate the affective evolution of an agent receiving a story. After formalizing the notions of awareness, curiosity, surprise and suspense, we explore the properties induced by our definitions and study the computational complexity of detecting them. We finally propose means to evaluate these emotions' intensity for a given agent listening to a story.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 10 sections, 5 theorems, 3 equations, 2 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background on reasoning about change and narrative tension
  3. Reasoning about action and change
  4. Emotions supporting narrative tension
  5. Logical models of emotions, surprises and awareness
  6. Formalizing curiosity, surprise and suspense
  7. Properties and graduality
  8. Properties derived from the definitions
  9. Towards defining measures
  10. Conclusion

Key Result

Proposition 1

If the epistemic state of an agent has no fact, i.e, $B=(\emptyset, B_\mathcal{L},B_\Delta)$ then the agent is not aware of any variable.

Figures (2)

  • Figure 1: Causal graph induced by the epistemic state $B\!_{\rightarrow 1}$
  • Figure 2: Suspense intensity along time ($c$ being the level of curiosity felt at time $t_0$)

Theorems & Definitions (24)

  • Example 1: The box
  • Definition 1: Lex-inference BCDLP93
  • Definition 2: Agent epistemic state and inference
  • Definition 3: awareness
  • Definition 4: epistemic state until $t$
  • Remark 1
  • Definition 5: curiosity
  • Example 2
  • Definition 6: suspense
  • Example 3
  • ...and 14 more