Is average face recognized as the average

In this paper, we address a very basic question of whether the average face of two face images is recognized as the average by a human. First, average faces were calculated for each of the pairs of images in our stimuli samples. Then, we conducted psychological experiments to compare an average face with two of the face images that were utilized for its calculation. In the experiment, participants were instructed to compare in terms of similarity as a whole and, select the image which is more similar to the average. Results showed that responses of the participants were nonuniformly-distributed across original image stimuli, suggesting that there was a significant bias on recognition of an average face. Eigenface space was constructed based on principal component analysis (PCA). Higher correlation was found between human and PCA based computer recognitions.