Processing facial emojis as social information: Evidence from visual working memory for facial emojis, simple shapes, human faces, and their relations to theory of mind

Abstract

Emojis, recognized as crucial nonverbal cues within computer-mediated communication (CMC), have gained widespread usage. Through the lens of visual working memory (WM), four experiments (N = 315) systematically investigate whether the cognitive processing of emojis elicit unique mechanisms akin to those involved in processing nonverbal cues within real-life social contexts. Experiment 1&4 reveal that despite the markedly higher visual complexity of facial emojis compared to simple objects (i.e., simple shapes), their WM capacities are comparable and notably surpass those for complex stimuli (e.g., human faces). This efficient processing can likely be attributed to their holistic processing manner, as demonstrated by Experiment 2, which reveals that inversion and scrambling significantly impair the WM of facial emojis. Furthermore, Experiment 3 indicates that facial emojis receive higher prioritization than simple shapes in WM, while Experiment 4 establishes a substantial association between WM for facial emojis and high-level social cognitive functions (theory of mind), similar to that for human faces. This study unveils a probable explanation for the widespread use of facial emojis: they are processed as social information similar to human faces, invoking social cognitive mechanisms, while also being efficiently processed like simple shapes, requiring minimal cognitive resources.