Work

Brain activity reveals how wildlife imagery evokes engagement on social media

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Vivid images of wildlife can motivate environmental advocacy and charitable giving, yet the mechanisms that drive their broad appeal remain unclear. To investigate how wildlife images influence online behavior, we combined behavioral experiments, neuroimaging data, and large-scale social media engagement data from National Geographic's Instagram. Consistent with findings on charitable giving to humans, activity in brain circuits associated with anticipatory affect (i.e. the nucleus accumbens or NAcc) and value integration (i.e. the medial prefrontal cortex or MPFC) predicted individual liking and donations to depicted wildlife. Further, group MPFC activity forecast aggregate engagement (i.e. likes controlling for followers) with wildlife images on social media. Auxiliary analyses indicated that neural activity in circuits associated with socioemotional processing (i.e. facial salience and mentalizing) correlated with MPFC activity. In a neurally inspired model, these socioemotional features forecast social media engagement in other wildlife images online. Together, these findings imply that neural activity not only forecasts engagement with wildlife imagery on social media but can also inform theoretical models of which wildlife image features most powerfully promote sustainable behavior.

Source: PNAS Nexus

DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgag012

Authors: Tara Srirangarajan, Nik Sawe, Tierney Thys, Xinzhe Cynthia Wu, Brian Knutson

Institutions: Stanford University, California Academy of Sciences

Language: English

Topic: Aesthetic Perception and Analysis

Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience

Field: Neuroscience

Domain: Life Sciences

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $4,202

Funder: National Geographic Society