Perception and Recognition of Photographic Quality Facial Caricatures: Implications for the Recognition of Natural Images

The perception and recognition of photographic images of famous faces was compared with the same images transformed to produce caricatures of different degrees of exaggeration. Following Brennan (1982; 1985), caricatures were produced by first comparing the position of facial features in a frame-grabbed image with the average position for a series of faces; deviations from the average were then accentuated by a constant fraction (16, 32 or 48%). Photographic quality caricatures for seven famous faces were generated by distorting regions of the original images in accordance with the change in feature positions. Images reducing the distinctiveness of faces (anticaricatures) were produced by decreasing deviations from the norm. In Experiment 1, perceptual ratings of the degree to which images resembled the individuals depicted was found to vary with the degree of caricaturing (— 32, -16, 0, +16, +32%). Interpolation from the data indicated that the best likeness occurred for images with a small degree of positive exaggeration (+4.4% on average). The magnitude of this caricature advantage correlated with the familiarity with the target faces and with the quality of.