Are caricatures special? Evidence of peak shift in face recognition

It has been shown that it is possible to obtain faster and more accurate re cognition for a caricatured face than for a veridical face. This could sugg est that there is something special about the transformations that produce caricatures. An experiment was conducted to investigate whether there are o ther circumstances in which improved recognition occurs away from the verid ical face. A peak-shift paradigm was employed, using images generated from morphing between two faces, where participants learned to respond to a targ et and learned not to respond to a similar non-target. When tested on the w hole range of morphed faces, the response profile showed a shift in the pea k of the responses away from the learned non-target face. From this it was concluded that the advantage seen with caricatures is not special but a res ult of a shift in the peak of responses away from more typical faces.