The effect of caricaturing on the esthetic appeal of familiar faces, and its relation to simple proportion judgments

It has been suggested that caricaturing enhances esthetic appeal, by making an image more strongly stimulate those areas of the brain encoding the subject's distinctive features than does the subject itself. However, some experimental work suggests that people prefer faces with proportions closer to average, or closer to a particular template. It might be that familiarity with the face is important if caricaturing is to increase the esthetic appeal of a likeness. Here we examined how automated caricaturing of photographs of nominal celebrities influenced judgments of esthetic appeal, and how familiarity with the celebrities affected these. Caricaturing monotonically decreased the esthetic appeal of the celebrity photographs, with subjects' familiarity with the celebrity not influencing this relationship. The degree to which caricaturing influenced esthetic appeal was not correlated with judgments of relative spatial dimensions for a simple shape, either in a discrimination threshold experiment or a peak-shift experiment.