Using Surprise to Create Products that get the Attention of other Agents

This paper addresses an aspect of social environments comprising a series of processes that begin with an artificial agent (the “author-agent”) producing surprising products (objects, events, etc.), continue with other artificial agents (the “jury-agents”) appraising those products with respect to surprise (manifested, for instance, by the focus of their attention on those products), and end with a possible update of the emotional state of the “author-agent” by the elicitation of emotions such as happiness and pride, or sadness (depending on whether or not those products get the attention of those “jury-agents”). We describe a model of surprise that is mainly rooted in the cognitivepsychoevolutionary model of surprise proposed by the research group of the University of Bielefeld (Meyer, Reinsenzein, Schutzwohl, etc.) and also in the ideas of Ortony and Partridge. We present an experimental test about the activity related to the creation and evaluation of surprising objects.