In the subfield of artificial intelligence called "knowledge representation and reasoning", theories of belief change have had a considerable impact. Indeed, belief change is at the heart of many tasks considered intelligent: learning, adapting, convincing. Research in this field has made it possible to formally characterize operators  for performing "non-monotonic reasoning" or "belief revision" as new information becomes available.

Moreover, one of the important means of integrating and transmitting beliefs in humans is storytelling. A story can be viewed from a global perspective as a way to draw conclusions about the underlying causality between events, or by focusing on the effect it has on the listener over time: as a sequence of successive revisions of beliefs. Thanks to belief change tools, it is then possible to identify certain ingredients that are useful for the narrator to engage their listener, such as surprise, curiosity, and suspense.

References

Dupin de Saint-Cyr, F., Bosser, A.-G., Callac, B., and Maisel, E. (2024). What killed the cat? Towards a logical formalization of curiosity (and suspense, and surprise) in narratives. In TIME 2024, volume 318, pages 10:1–10:16. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2410.08597

Dupin de Saint-Cyr, F. and Prade, H. (2023). Belief revision and incongruity: is it a joke? Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics, pages 1–28. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2309.02009

Katsuno, H. and Mendelzon, A. O. (1991b). Propositional knowledge base revision and minimal change. Artificial Intelligence, 52(3):263–294. https://doi.org/10.1016/0004-3702(91)90069-V

Gärdenfors, P. and Makinson, D. (1994). Nonmonotonic inference based on expectations. Artificial Intelligence, 65:197–245. https://doi.org/10.1016/0004-3702(94)90017-5

Baroni, R. (2007). La tension narrative: suspense, curiosité et surprise. Poétique. Éd. du Seuil, Paris.