FACIAL DISTINCTIVENESS AND THE POWER OF CARICATURES

Caricatures, which increase the distinctiveness of faces, are generall y recognised at least as well as undistorted images of those faces. Ho wever, caricatures seem to facilitate recognition more for some faces than others. An investigation was made into whether the effectiveness of caricaturing depends on a face's initial distinctiveness. In experi ments 1-3, subjects learned names for unfamiliar faces (photographs) t hat varied in distinctiveness, and were tested on recognition of caric atures, anticaricatures, and undistorted images of those faces. The te st images were line drawings in experiments 1 and 2 and photographic i mages in experiment 3. Experiments 1 and 2 were identical except that subjects had more exposure to the study photographs in experiment 1. I n all three experiments, distinctive faces were recognised (named) mor e accurately than less-distinctive faces, and caricatures were recogni sed at least as accurately as undistorted images and better than antic aricatures. However, distinctiveness and caricature level did not inte ract. Nor did a face's initial distinctiveness correlate with the degr ee of recognition facilitation produced by caricaturing (experiments 1 -3) or with the caricature level chosen as the best likeness (experime nt 4). The effectiveness of caricatures varied across faces and experi mental conditions, but these differences did not relate to differences in initial distinctiveness. These results prompted a more careful ana lysis of the expected relationship between initial distinctiveness and the power of caricatures, which indicated that the relationship may b e curvilinear rather than linear. In addition, it was found that line- drawing caricatures functioned as superportraits (recognised better th an undistorted images-experiment 1) but photographic caricatures did n ot (experiment 3), suggesting that the forensic potential of caricatur es may be limited.