Neuroscientists have shown how feelings of surprise experienced while watching sports create changes in brain patterns and contribute to the formation of particularly strong memories.
- The researchers observed large changes in activity patterns of the prefrontal cortex and pupil dilation during moments of surprise.
- The surprise effects on these activity patterns differed depending on the spectators’ pre-existing beliefs about which team was most likely to win.
In recent hours, the sports world is mourning its former glories. After the death of Christophe Dominici on Tuesday, it was Argentine football legend Diego Maradona who disappeared on Wednesday November 25. Two icons, to varying degrees, who have left indelible memories with supporters. To understand how sporting events are engraved in the memory of supporters, American neuroscientists from Princeton University have observed them. They presented the results of their research on November 25 in the journal Neuron.
Basketball as an example
Researchers have found that the surprise in sporting events is the main factor in anchoring these memories in our memory. “As we travel the world, we tend to segment events into separate chunksdetails the lead author of the study James Antony, a researcher at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. We later remember these pieces as discrete events. The question therefore arises: ‘How does our brain decide when one segment ends and another begins?’ Turns out it happens when something unexpected happens.”
To study this effect of surprise, the researchers observed spectators while they watched sports. They chose basketball because the sequence of actions offers more opportunities to observe how the brain reacts to changes. Twenty self-identified basketball fans watched the final five minutes of nine games at the 2012 U.S. College Tournament. The researchers chose these games because the mostly young college attendees are unlikely to have ever seen or to remember this event. To measure surprise, the researchers first calculated the probability of each team winning each game possession, and surprise was calculated as the change in this probability between possessions. As a result, matches that are close and have a lot of score changes generate more upsets than matches where the gap between the two teams is substantial.
More activity when his favorite team scores
While the participants watched the matches, they underwent eye tracking and functional MRI scans to measure neural activity. The researchers found greater changes in activity patterns of the prefrontal cortex and pupil dilations during moments of surprise. Curiously, the surprise effects on these activity patterns differed depending on the spectators’ pre-existing beliefs about which team was most likely to win. “Neuroimaging is usually done in a very controlled environment, but we wanted to do something more naturalisticdescribed James Antony. At the same time, there is a tendency to take advantage of Big Data by having many precise measurements. This is what we were able to do with our win probability metric.” The researchers also tracked activation in regions rich in dopamine, which contains information about rewards. Consistent with these rewarding effects, they found that there is greater activity in these regions when the subjects’ own favorite teams score.
Now the researchers are taking that data back to see if they can align the win probability metric with neural measures of engagement. They also plan to survey sports fans about their best and worst sports memories of their lives to see if they can relate those memories to their level of surprise. “Watching sports is an excellent paradigm for the perception and prediction of events because these predictions are quantifiableconcludes James Antony. Additionally, while sport is irrelevant to survival, it taps into deep human nature in terms of excitement and social connection..”