Human brain activity reflecting facial attractiveness from skin reflection

AbstractFacial attraction has a great influence on our daily social interactions. Previous studies have mainly focused on the attraction from facial shape and expression. We recently found that faces with radiant skin appear to be more attractive than those with oily-shiny or matte skin. In the present study, we conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and psychological experiments to determine the human brain activity that reflects facial attractiveness modulated by these skin reflection types. In the fMRI experiment, female subjects were shown successive images of unfamiliar female faces with matte, oily-shiny, or radiant skin. The subjects compared each face with the immediately preceding face in terms of attractiveness, age, and skin reflection, all based on the skin. The medial part of the orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) was significantly more active when comparing attractiveness than when comparing skin reflection, suggesting that the mOFC is involved in processing facial attractiveness from skin reflection. In the psychological experiment, attractiveness rating was highest for radiant skin, followed by oily-shiny, and then matte skin. Comparison of the results of these experiments showed that mOFC activation level increased with attractiveness rating. These results suggest that the activation level of the mOFC reflects facial attractiveness from skin reflection.

Download Full-text

The human brain views selfish behaviour towards genetic vs. non-genetic sibling differently

10.1101/112383 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Mareike Bacha-Trams ◽

Enrico Glerean ◽

Juha Lahnakoski ◽

Elisa Ryyppö ◽

Mikko Sams ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Social Cognition ◽

Human Brain ◽

Social Interactions ◽

Genetic Relationship ◽

Brain Activity ◽

Moral Dilemma ◽

Functional Magnetic Resonance ◽

Resonance Imaging ◽

Neurocognitive Evaluation ◽

Open Question

AbstractPrevious behavioural studies have shown that humans act more altruistically towards kin. Whether and how such kinship preference translates into differential neurocognitive evaluation of social interactions has remained an open question. Here, we investigated how the human brain is engaged when viewing a moral dilemma between genetic vs. non-genetic sisters. During functional magnetic resonance imaging, a movie depicting refusal of organ donation between two sisters was shown, with participants guided to believe the sisters were related either genetically or by adoption. The participants selfreported that genetic relationship was not relevant to them, yet their brain activity told a different story. When the participants believed that the sisters were genetically related, inter-subject similarity of brain activity was significantly stronger in areas supporting response-conflict resolution, emotion regulation, and self-referential social cognition. Our results show that mere knowledge of a genetic relationship between interacting persons can robustly modulate social cognition of the perceiver.

Download Full-text

An fMRI dataset in response to “The Grand Budapest Hotel”, a socially-rich, naturalistic movie

Scientific Data ◽

10.1038/s41597-020-00735-4 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 7 (1) ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Matteo Visconti di Oleggio Castello ◽

Vassiki Chauhan ◽

Guo Jiahui ◽

M. Ida Gobbini

Keyword(s):

Human Brain ◽

Social Interactions ◽

Cognitive Processes ◽

Face Processing ◽

Social Cognitive ◽

Brain Activity ◽

Fmri Data ◽

Feature Film ◽

Brain Responses ◽

Social Cognitive Processes

Abstract Naturalistic stimuli evoke strong, consistent, and information-rich patterns of brain activity, and engage large extents of the human brain. They allow researchers to compare highly similar brain responses across subjects, and to study how complex representations are encoded in brain activity. Here, we describe and share a dataset where 25 subjects watched part of the feature film “The Grand Budapest Hotel” by Wes Anderson. The movie has a large cast with many famous actors. Throughout the story, the camera shots highlight faces and expressions, which are fundamental to understand the complex narrative of the movie. This movie was chosen to sample brain activity specifically related to social interactions and face processing. This dataset provides researchers with fMRI data that can be used to explore social cognitive processes and face processing, adding to the existing neuroimaging datasets that sample brain activity with naturalistic movies.

Download Full-text

An fMRI dataset in response to “The Grand Budapest Hotel”, a socially-rich, naturalistic movie

10.1101/2020.07.14.203257 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Matteo Visconti di Oleggio Castello ◽

Vassiki Chauhan ◽

Guo Jiahui ◽

M. Ida Gobbini

Keyword(s):

Human Brain ◽

Social Interactions ◽

Cognitive Processes ◽

Face Processing ◽

Social Cognitive ◽

Brain Activity ◽

Fmri Data ◽

Feature Film ◽

Brain Responses ◽

Social Cognitive Processes

AbstractNaturalistic stimuli evoke strong, consistent, and information-rich patterns of brain activity, and engage large extents of the human brain. They allow researchers to compare highly similar brain responses across subjects, and to study how complex representations are encoded in brain activity. Here, we describe and share a dataset where 25 subjects watched part of the feature film “The Grand Budapest Hotel” by Wes Anderson. The movie has a large cast with many famous actors. Throughout the story, the camera shots highlight faces and expressions, which are fundamental to understand the complex narrative of the movie. This movie was chosen to sample brain activity specifically related to social interactions and face processing. This dataset provides researchers with fMRI data that can be used to explore social cognitive processes and face processing, adding to the existing neuroimaging datasets that sample brain activity with naturalistic movies.

Download Full-text

Meaning of goodness-of-fit in dipole approximation of human brain activity

Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology ◽

10.1016/s0013-4694(97)88932-1 ◽

1997 ◽

Vol 103 (1) ◽

pp. 196

Author(s):

J Hara

Keyword(s):

Human Brain ◽

Goodness Of Fit ◽

Brain Activity ◽

Dipole Approximation

Download Full-text

Siamese Reconstruction Network: Accurate Image Reconstruction from Human Brain Activity by Learning to Compare

Applied Sciences ◽

10.3390/app9224749 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 9 (22) ◽

pp. 4749

Author(s):

Lingyun Jiang ◽

Kai Qiao ◽

Linyuan Wang ◽

Chi Zhang ◽

Jian Chen ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Deep Learning ◽

Human Brain ◽

Brain Activity ◽

Feature Space ◽

Training Data ◽

Reconstruction Method ◽

Learning Method ◽

Training Samples ◽

Visual Reconstruction ◽

Relationship Of

Decoding human brain activities, especially reconstructing human visual stimuli via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), has gained increasing attention in recent years. However, the high dimensionality and small quantity of fMRI data impose restrictions on satisfactory reconstruction, especially for the reconstruction method with deep learning requiring huge amounts of labelled samples. When compared with the deep learning method, humans can recognize a new image because our human visual system is naturally capable of extracting features from any object and comparing them. Inspired by this visual mechanism, we introduced the mechanism of comparison into deep learning method to realize better visual reconstruction by making full use of each sample and the relationship of the sample pair by learning to compare. In this way, we proposed a Siamese reconstruction network (SRN) method. By using the SRN, we improved upon the satisfying results on two fMRI recording datasets, providing 72.5% accuracy on the digit dataset and 44.6% accuracy on the character dataset. Essentially, this manner can increase the training data about from n samples to 2n sample pairs, which takes full advantage of the limited quantity of training samples. The SRN learns to converge sample pairs of the same class or disperse sample pairs of different class in feature space.

Download Full-text