Several perceptually-based quality metrics have been introduced to predict the global impact of geometric artifacts on the visual appearance of a 3D model. They usually produce a single score that reflects the global level of annoyance caused by the distortions. However, beside this global information, it is also important in many applications to obtain information about the local visibility of the artifacts (i.e. estimating a localized distortion measure). In this work we present a psychophysical experiment where observers are asked to mark areas of 3D meshes that contain noticeable distortions. The collected per-vertex distortion maps are first used to illustrate several perceptual mechanisms of the human visual system. They then serve as ground-truth to evaluate the performance of well-known geometric attributes and metrics for predicting the visibility of artifacts. Results show that curvature-based attributes demonstrate excellent performance. As expected, the Hausdorff distance is a poor predictor of the perceived local distortion while the recent perceptually-based metrics provide the best results.