Children's and adults' reactions to a schema-discrepant event: A developmental analysis of surprise

Three studies investigated age-related differences in the surprise reaction . Study 1 revealed that children and seniors showed a more pronounced actio n delay in response to a simple, hedonically neutral surprising event than young adults that could not be attributed to a general slowing of informati on processing. Studies 2 and 3 provided evidence that these age-related dif ferences in action delay between children and young adults were due to chil dren's greater difficulties to find an explanation for the occurrence of th e surprising event and to decide on its relevance for action. These results support the idea that the core mechanism of surprise is evolutionary-based and age-invariant, but its eliciting conditions and consequences depend on developmental changes of knowledge structures.