Caricature and face recognition

Although caricatures are often gross distortions of faces, they frequently appear to be super-portraits capable of eliciting recognition better than veridical depictions. This may occur because faces are encoded as distinctive feature deviations from a prototype. The exaggeration of these deviations in a caricature may enhance recognition because it emphasizes the features of the face that are encoded. In two experiments, we tested the superportrait hypothesis and the encoding-by-caricature hypothesis. In the first experiment, caricatures were recognized better than faces, and true caricatures of previously seen faces were recognized better than the faces from which the caricatures had been developed. In the second experiment, faces and their caricatures were tachistoscopically presented in a sequential same/different reaction time task. Subjects were slower to distinguish the stimuli when the face preceded its caricature, indicating that caricatures are more similar to the encoded representation of a face than are stimuli in which the distinctive features are deemphasized.