You are undoubtedly able to recognize these familiar personalities, even though they are partially covered or distorted. This represents a key strength of human perception: We can recognize a pattern even if only part of it is perceived (seen, heard, felt) and even if it contains alterations. Our recognition ability is apparently able to detect invariant features of a pattern—characteristics that survive real-world variations. The apparent distortions in a caricature or in certain forms of art such as impressionism emphasize the patterns of an image (person, object) that we recognize while
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