Paragraphs about prosopagnosia

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.

That is Carl Zimmer, from the January/February 2011 issue of Discover, not yet on-line.  Here is a short piece on how to draw caricatures.

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