Emoticons in Mind: An event-related potential study

"Emoticons, like logographs, are readily understandable through their visual form and so represent a new way of communicating in written English. This study is the first to investigate the neural basis of this new medium of communication. The results show that while faces are recognized as faces when canonically arranged or inverted because both configural and featural mechanisms are able to process the image, emoticons are perceived as faces only through configural processes. When the configuration is disrupted (through a process such as inversion), the emoticon no longer carries its meaning as a face." [Taylor Francis Online]