6533b85cfe1ef96bd12bc94d
RESEARCH PRODUCT
Seeking the “Beauty Center” in the Brain: A Meta-Analysis of fMRI Studies of Beautiful Human Faces and Visual Art
Kaiping PengJie SuiYi HuangYi HuangHu Chuan-pengSimon B. Eickhoffsubject
AdultCognitive Neurosciencemedia_common.quotation_subjectVentromedial prefrontal cortexPrefrontal Cortex050105 experimental psychologyArticleVisual arts03 medical and health sciencesBehavioral NeuroscienceBeauty0302 clinical medicineNeuroimagingmedicineHumans0501 psychology and cognitive sciencesddc:610Prefrontal cortexmedia_commonBrain Mappingmedicine.diagnostic_test05 social sciencesVentral striatumBrainCognitionActivation likelihood estimationMagnetic Resonance Imagingmedicine.anatomical_structureMeta-analysisBeautyFunctional magnetic resonance imagingPsychology030217 neurology & neurosurgerydescription
AbstractThe existence of a common beauty is a long-standing debate in philosophy and related disciplines. In the last two decades, cognitive neuroscientists have sought to elucidate this issue by exploring the common neural basis of the experience of beauty. Still, empirical evidence for such common neural basis of different forms of beauty is not conclusive. To address this question, we performed an activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis on the existing neuroimaging studies of beauty appreciation of faces and visual art by non-expert adults (49 studies, 982 participants, meta-data are available at https://osf.io/s9xds/). We observed that perceiving these two forms of beauty activated distinct brain regions: while the beauty of faces convergently activated the left ventral striatum, the beauty of visual art convergently activated the anterior medial prefrontal cortex (aMPFC). However, a conjunction analysis failed to reveal any common brain regions for the beauty of visual art and faces. The implications of these results are discussed.
| year | journal | country | edition | language |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020-10-21 |