Are Caricatures Special? Evidence of Peak Shift in Face Recognition

Abstract

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