{
  "abstract": "Mirative markers, such as “surprisingly”, explicitly encode a violation of expectations. Such markers are used for expectation management during communication. Sensitivity to mirative markers relies on two abilities: (i) updating expectations upon recognizing a mirative marker, and (ii) identifying expectation violations warranting the use of a mirative marker. In this study, we compared sensitivity to mirative markers in humans and large language models (LLMs). In part 1, we used a sentence-completion task, where humans and LLMs were presented with sentence fragments and asked to continue them. Results show that for both humans and LLMs, the presence of a mirative marker significantly increased response entropy and decreased top-response probability, in line with theoretical accounts of mirative processing. In part 2, we created a novel task, mirative polarity selection, where humans and LLMs are presented with a sentence pair and asked to select whether it was connected by a mirative marker (“surprisingly”) or an anti-mirative marker (“unsurprisingly”). Results show that some LLMs perform at a human-equivalent level. We conclude that both humans and LLMs use mirative markers as cues for calibrating their subsequent expectations during sentence processing.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [
    "The Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, Bar-Ilan University"
  ],
  "article_type": null,
  "arxiv": null,
  "author_total": 3,
  "authors": [
    {
      "affs": [
        0
      ],
      "name": "Benjamin Menashe"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        0
      ],
      "name": "Austin Drake"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        0
      ],
      "name": "Michal Ben-Shachar"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/ajb9wre48x8td.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.1038/s41598-026-62526-y",
  "fulltext_url": "https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-62526-y",
  "id": "ajb9wre48x8td",
  "issns": [
    "2045-2322"
  ],
  "landing_url": "https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-62526-y",
  "language": "en",
  "licence": "CC-BY",
  "licence_label": "CC BY",
  "licence_source": "journal",
  "licence_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": null,
  "native_subjects": [
    [
      "lcc",
      "Q"
    ],
    [
      "lcc",
      "R"
    ],
    [
      "openalex",
      "1203|Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": "W4408342168",
  "pdf_url": "https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-62526-y_reference.pdf",
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-07-01",
  "publisher": "Nature Portfolio",
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/ajb9wre48x8td.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-10-30T13:45:48Z",
      "native_id": "c6925dbb49ab4df0bb4a85db604dc2e7",
      "source": "doaj",
      "url": "https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-62526-y"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "medicine",
      "origin": "lcc:R",
      "subfield": "general"
    }
  ],
  "title": "Expectation management in humans and LLMs",
  "title_text": "Expectation management in humans and LLMs",
  "type": "peer-reviewed",
  "updated_at": "2026-10-30T13:45:48Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/ajb9wre48x8td",
  "venue": "Scientific Reports",
  "versions": []
}