Shared neural basis for experiencing the beauty of human faces and visual art: Evidence from a meta-analyses of fMRI studies

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 for the experience of beauty. However, the neural representations of beauty remain poorly understood, especially regarding whether various forms of beauty, such as the beauty of faces and the beauty of art, share a common neural basis. Here, we addressed this question by performing an activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analyses, which quantitatively summarized the published neuroimaging literature of beautiful faces and beautiful visual art, and an meta-analytic connectivity modeling (MACM) analyses, which delineated the co-activation patterns of brain regions of interest in the BrainMap database. We observed that the left medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) was convergently activated by both beautiful visual art and beautiful faces, suggesting a common neural basis for beauty. In addition, the beauty of faces was exclusively associated with activity in the ACC and the gyrus rectus. These results indicate a shared neural basis for processing different forms of beauty.