Figure 2

Caricaturing and Experimental Task. (A) To make a caricature the veridical face is morphed away from a race/sex/age-matched average, such that all distinctive aspects of the face are exaggerated. In this individual, such aspects include the wide nose, the distance from nose to top lip, the thickness of eyebrows etc. Note that only shape, not colour (which would include lighting information, an unreliable cue to identity) is caricatured in our stimuli. Image based on Irons et al.³¹. (B) Explanation of caricaturing benefits in terms of a mental face-space. Caricaturing is guaranteed to move any two faces further away from each other in this multidimensional space. Note dimensions coded on the axes remain unknown (but are derived from a participant’s everyday ‘diet’ of faces, and code for both local attributes such as lip thickness and global attributes such as width of the face). Image based on Irons et al.³³. (C) Example trial. Faces are shown in 40% caricature strength condition. ‘AMD patient’ played by an actor.