PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Chuan-Peng Hu
AU  - Yi Huang
AU  - Simon B. Eickhoff
AU  - Kaiping Peng
AU  - Sui Jie
TI  - Seeking the common beauty in the brain: A meta-analysis of fMRI studies of beautiful human faces and visual art
AID  - 10.1101/081539
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 081539
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/06/25/081539.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/06/25/081539.full
AB  - The 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 neural basis of the experience of beauty. Still, it is unclear whether different forms of beauty share a common neural structures. To address this question, we performed an activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis on the existing neuroimaging studies of beautiful faces and beautiful visual art. We observed that perceiving two forms of beauty activated distinct brain regions: while the beauty of faces was associated with activities in the left ventral striatum, the beauty of visual art was associated with the anterior medial prefrontal cortex (aMPFC). There was no strong evidence for the common neural basis of different forms of beauty, although with a more liberal threshold, a small cluster at the left ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC) was activated by both forms of beauty. The implications of these results are discussed.