Caricature effects, distinctiveness, and identification: Testing the face-space framework

According to the multidimensional space framework, faces are represented as locations in a psychological face-space. Our aim was to test whether the l ocations of veridical, caricatured, and anticaricatured face stimuli in fac e-space, derived from multidimensional scaling analyses, could account for identification accuracy and distinctiveness ratings for these stimuli. Cari catures were identified more accurately and rated as more distinctive than veridical images, significant less distinctive than veridical images. In th e face-space derived from multidimensional scaling, caricatures were furthe r from the origin and less densely clustered than veridical image, whereas anticaricatures were closer to the origin and located in denser regions of the space. A quantitative model successfully predicted identification perfo rmance from the spatial locations of the stimuli. In general, the physicall y transformed faces were systematically mapped in the psychological space.