Art students work for years to learn to create good portraits that capture the likeness of a subject. Even among trained artists, it takes a special talent to draw faces accurately. This problem becomes even more difficult if the face is not present during drawing; that is, when one has to draw a face based on memory alone. Indeed, very few individuals possess this talent. Examples can be found among police sketch artists who are able to reproduce a face based on interviews with eyewitnesses.

What makes drawing faces from memory particularly difficult? One possibility is that human faces are all so similar that it requires exquisite attention to detail to create a drawing that truly captures the appearance of one particular face, distinguishing it from other similar faces. Another possibility is that drawing any complex object from memory would be equally challenging. It could be that the act of transforming any complex, 3-dimensional mental representation into a simplified, 2-dimensional line drawing is where the........

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