RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Seeking the common beauty in the brain: A meta-analysis of fMRI studies of beautiful human faces and visual art
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 081539
DO 10.1101/081539
A1 Chuan-Peng Hu
A1 Yi Huang
A1 Simon B. Eickhoff
A1 Kaiping Peng
A1 Sui Jie
YR 2018
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/06/25/081539.abstract
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.