Superportraits

Gillian Rhodes

As Nixon's unpopularity increased during Watergate, his nose and jowls grew to impossible proportions in published caricatures. Yet the caricatures remained instantly recognisable. Caricatures can even be superportraits, with the paradoxical quality of being more like the face than the face itself. How can we recognise such distorted images? Do caricatures derive their power from some special property of a face recognition system or from some more general property of recognition systems? What kind of mental representations and recognition processes make caricatures so effective? What can the power of caricatures tell us about recognition? In seeking to answer these questions, the author assembles clues from a variety of sources: The invention and development of caricatures by artists, the exploitation of extreme signals in animal communication systems, and studies of how humans, other animals and connectionist recognition systems respond to caricatures. "Superportraits" will be of interest to students of cognitive psychology, perception, the visual arts and animal behaviour.