Police forces should issue comical caricatures of criminals they are hunting instead of standard photofits, according to a team of scientists who found that cartoon-like faces are better at jolting people’s memories.

A study at the University of Central Lancashire found that over-emphasising prominent features on people’s faces made them twice as easy to identify than before.

Which would you remember? (NOT a criminal)

In tests, volunteers were asked to identify people from the standard photofit of their face and from their caricature. On average, a photofit face was correctly identified 20% of the time, compared with 40% for the caricature, according to a report in this month’s Visual Cognition journal.