The Neural Determinants of Beauty

Abstract

What are the conditions that determine whether the medial orbito-frontal cortex (mOFC), in which activity correlates with the experience of beauty derived from different sources, becomes co-active with sensory areas of the brain during the experience of sensory beauty? We addressed this question by studying the neural determinants of facial beauty. The perception of faces correlates with activity in a number of brain areas, but only when a face is perceived as beautiful is the mOFC also engaged. The enquiry thus revolved around the question of whether a particular pattern of activity, within or between areas implicated in face perception, emerges when a face is perceived as beautiful, and which determines that there is, as a correlate, activity in mOFC. 17 subjects of both genders viewed and rated facial stimuli according to how beautiful they perceived them to be while the activity in their brains was imaged with functional magnetic resonance imaging. A univariate analysis revealed parametrically scaled activity within several areas in which the strength of activity correlated with the declared intensity of the aesthetic experience of faces; the list included the mOFC and two core areas strongly implicated in the perception of faces - the occipital face area (OFA), fusiform face area (FFA)- and, additionally, the cuneus. Multivariate analyses showed strong patterns of activation in the FFA and the cuneus and weaker patterns in the OFA and the pSTS. It is only when specific patterns emerged in these areas that there was co-activation of the mOFC, in which a strong pattern also emerged during the experience of facial beauty. A psychophysiological interaction analysis with mOFC as the seed area revealed the involvement of the right FFA and the right OFA. We conjecture that these collective patterns of activity constitute the neural basis for the experience of facial beauty, bringing us a step closer to understanding the neural determinants of aesthetic experience.