Experience-driven recalibration of learning from surprising events

Different contexts 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, across two experiments, we examined whether participants performing a perceptual judgment task under spatial uncertainty (n=29, n=63) would spontaneously adapt 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 metalearning occurred in both directions, performance was consistently superior in contexts in which surprising events reflected meaningful change, potentially reflecting a bias toward interpreting surprise as informative. Overall, our results demonstrate remarkable flexibility in contextually adaptive metalearning.