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.aesthetic preference ͉ brain lateralization ͉ gender differences ͉ human evolution ͉ magnetoencefalography N euroimaging studies have elucidated a basic picture of the neural correlates of the appreciation of beauty. Activity has been reported during aesthetic preference tasks in a network of brain regions, including the frontal pole, orbitofrontal cortex, left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, caudate nucleus, temporal poles, anterior cingulate cortex, and occipital cortex (1-4). Behavioral experiments have shown that men and women rate the beauty of visual artistic and decorative stimuli in different ways (5, 6), but the extent to which the neural correlates of decisions about aesthetic beauty are influenced by the gender of the participants, is currently unknown.Gender differences in brain activity related with cognitive (7-9) and affective (10, 11) processes have been reported in many instances, showing in many cases differences in lateralization pattern. Such tasks as word generation, spatial attention, and working memory, are lateralized differently in women and men, although not all studies are consistent (12).The present study seeks to identify differences and similarities in brain activity between male and female participants while rating the beauty of artistic and non-artistic visual stimuli, by means of magnetoencephalography (MEG)-a technique that detects changes in the magnetic fields generated by the postsynaptic activity of neurons, with a temporal resolution of milliseconds. We also seek to ascertain whether any possible differences between the sexes are due ...

Unpleasant emotional distraction can impair the retention of non-emotional information in working memory (WM). Research links the prefrontal cortex with the successful control of such biologically relevant distractors, although the temporal changes in this brain mechanism remain unexplored. We use magnetoencephalography to investigate the temporal dynamics of the cognitive control of both unpleasant and pleasant distraction, in the millisecond (ms) scale. Behavioral results demonstrate that pleasant events do not affect WM maintenance more than neutral ones. Neuroimaging results show that prefrontal cortices are recruited for the rapid detection of emotional distraction, at early latencies of the processing (70-130 ms). Later in the processing (360-450 ms), the dorsolateral, the medial and the orbital sections of the prefrontal cortex mediate the effective control of emotional distraction. In accordance with the behavioral performance, pleasant distractors do not require higher prefrontal activity than neutral ones. These findings extend our knowledge about the brain mechanisms of coping with emotional distraction in WM. In particular, they show for the first time that overriding the attentional capture triggered by emotional distractors, while maintaining task-relevant elements in mind, is based on the early detection of such linked-to-survival information and on its later cognitive control by the prefrontal cortex.

Emotional stimuli automatically recruit attentional resources. Although this usually brings more adaptive responses, it may suppose a disadvantage when emotional information is task-irrelevant and should be ignored. Previous studies have shown how emotional stimuli with a negative content exert a greater interference than neutral stimuli during a concurrent working memory (WM) task. However, the impact of positively valenced stimuli as interference has not been addressed to date. In three experiments and one re-analysis we explore the impact of pleasant and unpleasant emotional distractors during WM maintenance. The results suggest that our cognitive control can cope with the interference posed by pleasant distractors as well as with the interference posed by neutral stimuli. However, unpleasant distractors are harder to control in the context of WM maintenance. As unpleasant stimuli usually convey relevant information that we should not to ignore, our executive control seems to be less able to reallocate cognitive resources after unpleasant distraction.