A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words: Reply to "On the Difficulty of Averaging Faces"

Authors

Judith H. Langlois
Lori A. Roggman, Utah State UniversityFollow
Lisa Musselman
Scott Acton

Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Psychological Science

Volume

2

Issue

5

Publisher

JSTOR

Publication Date

9-1991

First Page

354

Last Page

357

Abstract

Pittenger (PS, 1991, 2, 351-353) criticizes three characteristics of our technique of mathematically averaging faces to produce an attractive composite face (Langlois & Roggman, 1990). He claims that our procedure compromises the "... ability to recover either morphologically normal faces or mental prototypes of faces" and compromises "the ability to recover optimum structure" of faces. The problems he cites are: (1) averaging the gray values of a matrix of the whole face rather than averaging spatial locations of anatomically defined features; (2) using two-dimensional rather than three-dimensional representations of faces; and (3) using a "mean" as a measure of central tendency rather than using a true "optimum value" or some other measure of central tendency.

Comments

Publisher PDF is available through the link above. Publisher requires a subscription to access the article.

Recommended Citation

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words: Reply to "On the Difficulty of Averaging Faces" Judith H. Langlois, Lori A. Roggman, Lisa Musselman and Scott Acton Psychological Science Vol. 2, No. 5 (Sep., 1991) (pp. 354-357)