Caricature Drawings

A caricature is defined as a portrait that exaggerates the essence of a person to create an easily identifiable visual likeness. The question is, why do we quickly recognize a well-drawn caricature of a famous person, even though it is clearly not accurate? In short, because visual perception is much greater than the sensory information we take in through the eyes.

It all starts with the fact that sensation—what we sense—is not the same as perception. Sensation refers to the input of raw sensory data from the external world into your processing system. Perception organizes sensory information into a mental impression or a percept—in an effort to make it meaningful.

In order to recognize a famous person in a caricature, we must match the information in the percept (our mental impression) to our memory’s stored representation of the person. Interestingly, we usually recognize a well-drawn caricature more rapidly than a realistic drawing for several reasons.

We store the visual attributes of a face in memory, possibly as an image or as a group of rules. Seeing the exaggerated features in a caricature seems to closely match what we have stored in memory, probably because the distinguishing features are what makes the face unique. When what we perceive matches our memory store, we recognize the caricature.



Here are some of my favorites (from top) .... Christopher Walken , Bill Murray , Nicole Kidman , Elvis , House , Napolian Dynamite , Sylvester Stallone and Will Smith .