Team Emoji on Tour!

Team Emoji has been gracing a number of conferences recently. At the start of July, we were at the British Psychological Society's Cyberpsychology Section conference on the beautiful grounds of York St John University.

Team Emoji (from left to right): Lee Hurley, Rebecca Fuller, Sneha Thomas and Linda Kaye

In attendance at the conference was Team Emoji PI, Professor Linda Kaye, as well as Lee Hurley and Edge Hill University interns, Sneha Thomas and Rebecca Fuller. We were especially grateful to Edge Hill University's Thrive Fund for supporting our interns to attend this event, as well as the Department of Psychology Paid Internship Scheme which provided them with plentiful opportunities to get hands-on experience of learning about psychology research.

At the event, we presented our work so far on our Emoji Sensorimotor Norms project in the oral presentation "And Eyes and Ears and Mouth and ….Emoji”: Determining the impact of the perceptual and action strengths of emoji." We got asked plenty of fascinating questions and were glad with the wonderful positive feedback we received.

Later into the month, Team Emoji also attended the Embodied and Situated Language Processing (ESLP) Conference, at the wonderful Lancaster University. In attendance were Lee Hurley and Dr James Brand, who expertly delivered our project presentation entitled: "SENSEMOJI: Establishing sensorimotor norms for 1,785 emoji" Here, we focused on understanding how perceptual strengths of emoji concepts compared to those on the original Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms research, and the extent to which our human emoji norming data compares to LLM estimates (Spoiler- LLMs don't seem to be great at this!)

We are really enjoying disseminating our project findings so far and are continuing in our quest to collect large-scale data from a wide-ranging participant pool. If you would like to contribute your data, you can do so here.