by Patrick Appel
Carl Zimmer mulls face blindness:
Face space also explains why the favorite trick of editorial cartoonists works so well. By exaggerating features on a politician's face -- Bush's eyebrows, Obama's ears -- cartoonists push it farther away from the center of face space, to places where it has less competition from other faces we have stored in our memory. As a result, we recognize people from hand-drawn caricatures as quickly as from photographs -- and sometimes even more quickly.