Sex-related similarities and differences in the neural correlates of beauty
Sex-related similarities and differences in the neural correlates of beauty
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DOI：
10.1073/pnas.0900304106
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发表时间：
2009-03-10
影响因子：
11.1
通讯作者：
Marty, Gisele
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Cela-Conde, Camilo J.;Ayala, Francisco J.;Marty, Gisele
欣赏美的能力是我们人类最显著的特征之一。虽然关于其神经相关性的知识正在增长，但对任何与性别有关的差异知之甚少。我们已经探索了男性和女性在审美偏好的神经相关性方面可能存在的差异。我们使用脑磁图记录了10名男性和10名女性参与者的大脑活动，当他们决定他们是否认为艺术和自然视觉刺激的例子是美丽的。我们的研究结果揭示了显着不同的活动性别之间的顶叶区域时，参与者判断的刺激为美丽。女性的大脑活动是双侧的，而男性的大脑活动则偏向右半球。众所周知，背侧视觉处理流，其中包括上级顶叶地区，已显着修改整个人类进化。我们认为，观察到的与性别有关的差异是人类和黑猩猩谱系分裂后发生的进化过程的结果。鉴于以前的结果性别差异的神经相关的坐标和分类空间策略，我们推断，不同的策略使用的男性和女性在评估审美偏好可能反映了不同的策略与劳动分工之间的男性和女性狩猎采集的古人类祖先。
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 gender-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 whether or not they considered examples of artistic and natural visual stimuli to be beautiful. Our results reveal significantly different activity between the sexes in 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 gender-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 gender 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.