Caricaturing and face-space theory.

A. Caricaturing illustrated using one of our face stimuli. The shape information in the veridical (original) face is physically altered to exaggerate it away from the average face (matched to the veridical on sex, race, age group and viewpoint, to ensure caricaturing of only identity information). Note how caricaturing makes the man’s longer-than-average chin become even longer, the smaller-than-average eyebrow-to-eye distance become even smaller, the slightly turned up nose become more so, and so on. B. Standard explanation (for review see [29]) of caricaturing benefits in terms of a multidimensional mental face-space. The dimensions coded on the axes remain unknown (but might represent, for example, attributes such as lip thickness or width of the face).