3-DIMENSIONAL CARICATURES OF HUMAN HEADS - DISTINCTIVENESS AND THE PERCEPTION OF FACIAL AGE

A standard facial-caricaturing algorithm was applied to a three-dimens ional representation of human heads. This algorithm sometimes produced heads that appeared 'caricatured'. More commonly, however, exaggerati ng the distinctive three-dimensional information in a face seemed to p roduce an increase in the apparent age of the face-both at a local lev el, by exaggerating small facial creases into wrinkles, and at a more global level via changes that seemed to make the underlying structure of the skull more evident. Concomitantly, de-emphasis of the distincti ve three-dimensional information in a face made it appear relatively y ounger than the veridical and caricatured faces. More formally, face-a ge judgments made by human observers were ordered according to the lev el of caricature, with anticaricatures judged younger than veridical f aces, and veridical faces judged younger than caricatured faces. These results are discussed in terms of the importance of the nature of the features made more distinct by a caricaturing algorithm and the natur e of human representation(s) of faces.