ABSTRACT
This chapter examines what has gone wrong with attempts to replicate the distinctiveness effect. It is argued that when viewed in the broader context of expertise effects a caricature advantage for unfamiliar faces is not only expected but predicted. A closer examination of the methodologies highlights weaknesses in their design. Furthermore, viewing the caricature advantage as an indicator of expert facial processing allows us to challenge the notion of the child as a novice face processor. Expertise in facial processing is an issue that has long been of interest to psychologists. The face itself is a highly complex stimulus but perhaps more impressive than the face as a stimulus is our ability to process that stimulus. The differential inversion effect was first demonstrated by R. K. Yin and describes the state in which inversion of a stimulus is more detrimental to its subsequent recognition if that stimulus is a face rather than an aeroplane, a house or a running stick-man.
