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Sex-related similarities and differences in the neural correlates of beauty

Cela-Conde, C. J.; Ayala, F. J.; Munar, E.; Maestú, F.; Nadal, M.; Capó, M. A.; del Río, D.; Juan J. López-Ibor J.; Ortiz, T.; Mirasso, C. R.; Marty, G.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of he USA (PNAS) 106, 3847-3852 (2009)

The capacity to appreciate beauty is one of our species’ most remarkable traits. Although knowledge about its neural correlates is growing, little is known about any sex-related differences. We have explored possible differences between men and women’s neural correlates of aesthetic preference. We have used magnetoencephalography to record the brain activity of 10 male and 10 female participants while they decided the beauty or not of either artistic or natural visual stimuli. Our results reveal significantly different activity between the sexes in superior parietal regions when participants judged the stimuli as beautiful. Activity in this region was bilateral in women, whereas it was lateralized to the right hemisphere in men. It is known that the dorsal visual processing stream, which encompasses the superior parietal areas, has been significantly modified throughout human evolution. We posit that the observed sex-related differences are the result of evolutionary processes that occurred after the splitting of the human and chimpanzee lineages. In view of previous results on sex differences with respect to the neural correlates of coordinate and categorical spatial strategies, we infer that the different strategies used by men and women in assessing aesthetic preference may reflect differences in the strategies associated with the division of labor between our male and female hunter-gatherer hominin ancestors.