Reward value of attractiveness and gaze

K. K. W. Kampe, C. D. Frith, R. J. Dolan, U. Frith

Nature 413, 589 (2001)

Reward-related responses have been registered in animal brains mostly in the ventral half of the striatum, from the nucleus accumbens to the pallidum. Considering the location of the response to attractive faces we describe, the observed activation was large and its spatial extent was not clear from Fig. 2, although we inferred that the ventral stratum was involved. From the plane shown, this activation more accurately extended ventrally into the striatum, specifically into the palladium; the nucleus accumbens proper was not activated. Dorsally, the activation extended into the anterior thalamus (as shown in Fig. 2). Our conclusions that the attractiveness of faces is processed in brain regions involved in evaluating the reward value of stimuli, and that this processing depends on gaze direction, are unaltered.