Ethologist Konrad Lorenz defined the baby schema (''Kindchenschema'') as a set of infantile physical features, such as round face and big eyes, that is perceived as cute and motivates caretaking behavior in the human, with the evolutionary function of enhancing offspring survival. The neural basis of this fundamental altruistic instinct is not well understood. Prior studies reported a pattern of brain response to pictures of children, but did not dissociate the brain response to baby schema from the response to children. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging and controlled manipulation of the baby schema in infant faces, we found that baby schema activates the nucleus accumbens, a key structure of the mesocorticolimbic system mediating reward processing and appetitive motivation, in nulliparous women. Our findings suggest that engagement of the mesocorticolimbic system is the neurophysiologic mechanism by which baby schema promotes human caregiving, regardless of kinship.caregiving ͉ functional MRI ͉ social cognition ͉ infant ͉ accumbens

The "face in the crowd effect" refers to the finding that threatening or angry faces are detected more efficiently among a crowd of distractor faces than happy or nonthreatening faces. Work establishing this effect has primarily utilized schematic stimuli and efforts to extend the effect to real faces have yielded inconsistent results. The failure to consistently translate the effect from schematic to human faces raises questions about its ecological validity. The present study assessed the face in the crowd effect using a visual search paradigm that placed veridical faces, verified to exemplify prototypical emotional expressions, within heterogeneous crowds. Results confirmed that angry faces were found more quickly and accurately than happy expressions in crowds of both neutral and emotional distractors. These results are the first to extend the face in the crowd effect beyond homogenous crowds to more ecologically valid conditions and thus provide compelling evidence for its legitimacy as a naturalistic phenomenon.

Regions of the fusiform gyrus (FG) respond preferentially to faces over other classes of visual stimuli. It remains unclear whether emotional face information modulates FG activity. In the present study, whole-head magnetoencephalography (MEG) was obtained from fifteen healthy adults who viewed emotionally expressive faces and made button responses based upon emotion (explicit condition) or age (implicit condition). Dipole source modeling produced source waveforms for left and right primary visual and left and right fusiform areas. Stronger left FG activity (M170) to fearful than happy or neutral faces was observed only in the explicit task, suggesting that directed attention to the emotional content of faces facilitates observation of M170 valence modulation. A strong association between M170 FG activity and reaction times in the explicit task provided additional evidence for a role of the fusiform gyrus in processing emotional information.

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