Beautiful People in the Brain of the Beholder

In the paper discussed in this chapter, the authors were interested in the neural underpinnings for facial beauty and whether such responses were automatic. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging study over two sessions, the authors asked participants to make beauty and identity judgments on a series of computer-generated faces. When people judged beauty, the authors found that neural activity varied parametrically to the degree of facial attractiveness in the fusiform face area and the lateral occipital complex, as well as in parts of parietal and frontal cortices. When people made familiarity judgments, the authors observed the same modulation of neural activity within occipital cortex to the degree of attractiveness in the faces. The data suggested that human brains automatically respond to facial beauty even when people might be attending to other aspects of the faces they apprehend.