Understanding Lightbulb Moments: Meaning-making in visual morphology from comics and emoji

How do we interpret a lightbulb above a head to mean inspiration? We investigated the semantic processing of these“upfixes” like lightbulbs or gears that float above characters’ heads. We examined the congruity of face-upfix dyadspresented sequentially with words describing their literal (“lightbulb”) or non-literal meanings (“inspiration”). To ex-amine if upfixes alone sponsor meanings, upfixes either matched or mismatched the facial expression (ex. lightbulbover an excited vs. sad face). Literal words always evoked faster response times when presented before images. Whenimages appeared before words, literal words were responded to slower than non-literal words for matching dyads, butfaster times for mismatching dyads. Non-literal words were rated as more congruous with matching dyads, while literalwords were more congruous with mismatching dyads. Thus, non-literal upfix meanings (e.g., inspiration/lightbulb) areingrained in memory only when matching their faces, supporting that they belong to a constrained visual lexicon.