Car Faces are Female : Parallels in the Neural Activaton elecited by Human and Car Faces

Car designers and critics often refer to car fronts as faces, thus, interpreting the lights as eyes and the grille as nose/mouth. Perceiving nonhuman objects as human is called anthropomorphizing and behavioral studies indicate that fostering this tendency in products leads to several desirable responses on the customer's side. So far, studies on this topic lack process measures in order to prove this to be the underlying mechanism leaving room for several other explanations. An fMRI study comparing the processing of female, male and car faces indicates that the general pattern of activation overlaps remarkably between human and car faces and the activation of the reward circuit is similar for female and car faces. This result points to the potential of applying laws of beauty established in the domain of human faces to car designs to increase their liking.