Understanding caricatures of faces

Lateral caricatures are transformed faces like caricatures but the transformation is orthogonal (in the face-space, Valentine, 1991) to the direction of caricaturization. It has been reported that lateral caricatures are more difficult to recognize than anti-caricatures (Rhodes & Tremewan, 1994). To investigate this effect, oblique caricatures (transformed obliquely to caricaturing) were generated by morphing between a veridical face and a reference face. Two experiments used a forced-choice similarity task to find which images are perceived to have the least change from the veridical. An advantage for caricatures over anti-caricatures was found, but none was found between oblique and anti-caricatures. Performance of theoretical lateral caricatures was extrapolated from the oblique caricature data. These lateral caricatures would be perceived as more similar to the veridical faces than were the anti-caricatures.