What killed the cat? Towards a logical formalization of curiosity (and suspense, and surprise) in narratives

Humans tell stories to make sense of the world and communicate their understanding of what happens. Storytelling supposes to be able to sort out which events are worth telling, deciding on a level of detail for describing events, selecting among possible causes the ones which are deemed worth telling. It also supposes to make use of an affective machinery for capturing an audience's attention (emotional contagion, suspense elicitation...). In the act of storytelling, structural and affective phenomena are thus combined with communicative goals in mind. This combination has indeed shown its effectiveness in this respect: the phenomenon of narrative transportation (the experience of being immersed in a story) has been linked to persuasion [27]. The narrative paradigm therefore provides an appropriate framework, in which causal reasoning about the situations narrated [53] is combined with narrative devices to encourage the audience's emotional involvement [51], to study and model how opinion is formed and evolves. Building a framework for reasoning about and unveiling storytelling mechanics could pave the way for intellectual selfdefense supporting tools, enabling citizens to arm themselves against hostile disinformation or influence campaigns. Previous works in structural narratology have studied the way stories are conveyed to their audience and seminal work from (for instance) Genette [25] or Propp [45] have previously served as the backbone inspiration for computational narrative models and storytelling systems [43].