Abstract
The nature of beauty has been debated in philosophy for thousands of years. Recently, cognitive neuroscientists have sought to elucidate this issue by exploring the neural basis of the experience of beauty, and it is controversial as to whether different forms of beauty share common neural structures. Here, we addressed this question by performing an activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis, as well as a meta-analytic co-activation modeling (MACM) analysis, which delineated the co-activation patterns of brain regions of interest in the BrainMap database, on published neuroimaging literature of beautiful faces and beautiful visual art. We observed that the left ventromedial prefrontal cortex(vMPFC)/pregenual anterior cingulate gyrus (pgACC) was convergently activated by both beautiful visual art and beautiful faces, suggesting a common neural basis for general beauty. In addition, the beauty of faces was also associated with activity in the left ventral striatum, while the beauty of visual art was also associated with left anterior medial prefrontal cortex (aMPFC). These results indicate a shared neural basis exists for processing different forms of beauty, meanwhile, different neural mechanisms were co-existed to support the domain specific experiences of beauty.