Brain imaging identifies the social and emotional features of wildlife photos that drive engagement on social media. Tara Srirangarajan and colleagues scanned the brains of 34 adults while the participants viewed 56 wildlife images from National Geographic’s Instagram feed and made decisions in a matter of seconds about whether to “like” posts and/or donate to depicted species. Activity in the nucleus accumbens and medial prefrontal cortex predicted individual choices to like and donate. Medial prefrontal cortex activity averaged across the group forecast actual engagement with the same images on Instagram, measured by likes relative to follower counts. Further analysis revealed that medial prefrontal cortex activity correlated with brain regions involved in face processing and mentalizing. The authors coded images for whether animal faces appeared and for the phylogenetic closeness of the subjects to humans, finding that these features predicted engagement. The resulting neurally-inspired model successfully forecast engagement for an additional 276 wildlife images from the same social media feed. According to the authors, conservation organizations seeking to increase public engagement and donations might strategically emphasize animal faces and evolutionarily similar species such as mammals in their visual content.
PNAS Nexus
Brain activity reveals how wildlife imagery evokes engagement on social media
17-Feb-2026
T.T. is affiliated with the National Geographic Society, which provided some of the data used in this study. The other authors declare no competing interests.