Remembering beauty: Roles of orbitofrontal and hippocampal regions in successful memory encoding of attractive faces

Abstract

Behavioral data have shown that attractive faces are better remembered but the neural mechanisms of this effect are largely unknown. To investigate this issue, female participants were scanned with event-related functional MRI (fMRI) while rating the attractiveness of male faces. Memory for the faces was tested after fMRI scanning and was used to identify successful encoding activity (subsequent memory paradigm). As expected, attractive faces were remembered better than other faces. The study yielded three main fMRI findings. First, activity in the right orbitofrontal cortex increased linearly as a function of attractiveness ratings. Second, activity in the left hippocampus increased as a function of subsequent memory (subsequent misses<low-confidence hits<high-confidence hits). Third, functional connectivity between these orbitofrontal and hippocampal regions was stronger during the encoding of attractive than neutral or unattractive faces. These results suggest that better memory for attractive faces reflects greater interaction between a region associated with reward, the orbitofrontal cortex, and a region associated with successful memory encoding, the hippocampus.

Neural Correlates of Emotional Memories: A Review of Evidence From Brain Imaging Studies

“…For instance, increased activity in the orbitofrontal cortex was associated with encoding of attractive faces (e.g., Harvey et al, 2007;Tsukiura & Cabeza, 2011a). In addition, greater activity in the medial orbital PFC together with enhanced connectivity with the HC have been observed during encoding of socially rewarding stimuli (i.e., smiling faces) (Tsukiura & Cabeza, 2008) (see Fig.…”

“…Although fewer studies have investigated the interplay between social cognition and emotion in memory, it seems to be a promising avenue of research, which should shed light on our understanding of emotional memory for more ecologically valid situations, involving interactions with other people and having direct relevance to our own social behavior. To have an adequate social behavior, humans learn social conventions and norms, and distinguish between "what is good and what is bad" (Tsukiura & Cabeza, 2011a, 2011bTsukiura, Shigemune, Nouchi, Kambara, & Kawashima, 2012); hence, the social dimension appears to be an important factor in emotional memory.…”

“Wanted!” The effects of reward on face recognition: electrophysiological correlates

“…Importantly, it has been shown the existence of a strong interaction between reward-related processes, involving the orbito-frontal cortex, and successful memory encoding, which relies on the hippocampus (Tsukiura & Cabeza, 2011).…”

Beautiful Faces Enhance Verbal Working Memory Performance: An Nirs Study

“…This suggests that diverse mechanisms underlie the cognitive performance enhancement induced by different incentives. However, to the best of our knowledge, no study has investigated the effects of social rewards on cognitive performance and the underlying neural mechanisms, although some studies have investigated the brain activation underlying the effect of facial attractiveness on the memory of the attractive faces themselves (Marzi & Viggiano, 2010;Tsukiura & Cabeza, 2011a). In the present study, we examined the effect of social rewards on cognitive performance.…”