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Published on: March 15, 2019
The neural response to facial attractiveness
Anjan Chatterjee1, Amy Thomas, Sabrina E Smith
1Department of Neurology and Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia 19104, USA. anjan@mail.med.upenn.edu
Abstract:
What are the neural correlates of attractiveness? Using functional MRI (fMRI), the authors addressed this question in the specific context of the apprehension of faces. When subjects judged facial beauty explicitly, neural activity in a widely distributed network involving the ventral occipital, anterior insular, dorsal posterior parietal, inferior dorsolateral, and medial prefrontal cortices correlated parametrically with the degree of facial attractiveness. When subjects were not attending explicitly to attractiveness, but rather were judging facial identity, the ventral occipital region remained responsive to facial beauty. The authors propose that this region, which includes the fusiform face area (FFA), the lateral occipital cortex (LOC), and medially adjacent regions, is activated automatically by beauty and may serve as a neural trigger for pervasive effects of attractiveness in social interactions.
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