In addition to visual art, the conference also covered a topic of special interest in visual neuroaesthetics: facial beauty. Other peo- ple’s faces constitute highly relevant stimuli for humans, and face perception is mediated by distributed neural regions (Ishai, 2007), including the extrastriate cortex, which is specially dedicated to processing individual identity, and the superior temporal sulcus, which processes facial movements involved in speech and direct- ing gaze. Regions of the limbic system, such as the amygdala and insula, are involved in recognizing facial expressions of emotion. Research during the last decade has revealed that facial beauty is processed by regions of the reward circuit, especially the nucleus accumbens and orbitofrontal.
