I have a theory that pattern-matching is an essential adaptive trait
and that therefore successful pattern-matching triggers a pleasurable
response.

My theory says that a pleasure response is often directly attributable
to nothing other than achieving a pattern-match and that we are wired
to lay a whole lot of other stuff over it--emotional stuff, such as
delight, nostalgia, sentimentality, comfort, affection--because it
acts as a positive reinforcer of the necessary behavior.

For example, the warm, deliciously nostalgic feeling of recognition
that floods us as we reach the turn in the road that says "almost
there!" when we return to the neighborhood of our childhood is, so my
theory goes, a result of the way we're programmed to respond to the
necessity of knowing which way is home.

Similarly, the feeling of well-being we get from spotting a familiar
face in a crowd, or even the excitement of seeing a well-known
celebrity, is rooted in a hard-wired survival-based need to know which
one is mother, which are your people, who your tribe is.  Those
celebrity faces really aren't anything special--look at a shot from a
foreign film that includes one or two top stars in the country where
the film was made, and their hottest box-office faces don't particular
impress us simply because we don't recognize them.  But your own
favorites jump right out at you even from a crowd shot or a grainy
news photos.

I think that the pleasure we take in familiar music, in hearing
expected lines of dialogue in a play, in a class reunion, in returning
to favorite vacation spots, and in many, many other experiences that
we think we enjoy for some other reason is at bottom a survival-based
response to something we recognize or something that is closely
similar to something we already know.

Pattern-matching is essential, of course, in order to know not just
whom you belong to and where you belong but which herbs are all right
to eat and which are poisonous, what to do when the sky looks like
that, how to tell when to start planting, etc.  That much seems
self-evident.  The part I am curious about--the part I want an answer
to--is if it has been shown that a pleasure response is in fact tied
to pattern matching: not just a generalized pleasure in "success"
(because the match may be unlooked-for, as in spotting a sign of
danger or a neutral symbol) but specifically if there is a trigger to
a pleasure center in the brain when a match is achieved.

The only way I could really think of to test this would be to measure
a synaptic response at the moment of recognition--and I don't know how
you would do that with a live subject.

So my question is this: does research exist that would prove or
disprove my theory of a direct cause-and-effect association between
achieving a pattern match and experiencing a pleasure response?

Naturally it follows that I want to see the research.

If someone else has already put forth and proved (or disproved) this
theory, that will be welcome news.  This is not my field of specialty.
 I am writing as an interested amateur and not as someone schooled in
these subjects, so I will call it "my theory" until I find out that it
isn't.

Thank you,
Apteryx

Apteryx...

This is such an interesting question, I had to spend some
time with it, but I can't really take it to the degree of
completion it deserves. 

The articles listed on this page at PubMed are 'related links'
to the first article, which is seems relevant to your query.
Unfortunately, I can't access the full text of the articles.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Display&dopt=pubmed_pubmed&from_uid=1532823

I hope this gets you and other researchers started.


Searches done, via Google:

"pattern recognition" pleasure -Gibson -"pleasure to"
://www.google.com/search?q=%22pattern+recognition%22+pleasure+-Gibson+-%22pleasure+to%22

Here's an excerpt from an interesting article that indicates the
opposite: that, rather than being stimulated by the familiar, the
brain is more "pleased" by the unexpected.

-------------------------------

The Emory and Baylor scientists used functional magnetic resonance
imaging to measure changes in human brain activity in response to a
sequence of pleasurable stimuli, in this case, fruit juice and water.
In the study, a computer-controlled device squirted fruit juice and
water into the mouths of research participants. The patterns of juice
and water squirts were either predictable or completely unpredictable.

"...when we tested this idea in brain scanning experiments, we found
the reward pathways responded much more strongly to the unexpectedness
of stimuli instead of their pleasurable effects."

...Contrary to the scientists' expectations, the human reward pathways
in the brain responded most strongly to the unpredictable sequence of
squirts. The area of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, which
scientists previously have identified as a pleasure center of the
brain, recorded a particularly strong response to the unexpectedness
of a sequence of stimuli.

"We find that so-called pleasure centers in the brain do not react
equally to any pleasurable substance, but instead react more strongly
when the pleasures are unexpected," Berns said. "This means that the
brain finds unexpected pleasures more rewarding than expected ones,
and it may have little to do with what people say they like."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/04/010415224316.htm

These are interesting posts.  Thank you, sublime1 and Pinkfreud.  When
I've had a chance to study all your finds, perhaps I'll see that my
theory is wrong, but at present I am not sure these studies actually
touch on what I was after.

Sublime1, I couldn't figure out how to see beyond the abstracts to the
articles themselves, but it appeared to me that these were mostly
contrived tests of memory wherein the researchers showed things to
subjects under various conditions and then tested their recall.  Some
content was selected because it was pleasurable in nature.  To me this
seems quite different from having a pleasure response to the
recognition of essentially neutral content (such as a streetcorner) so
that it's the recognition itself and not the content that triggers the
response (and the pleasure is not a matter of some prejudgment on the
part of the experimenter, such as birds + sunshine = good, angry face
+ weapon = bad).  I don't know how this could possibly be tested under
lab conditions and in a short-term study.  If subjects supplied
photographs of people and places known to them from their own past so
that they could react to them, it would hardly be under experimental
control.  And anyway, a photograph engages only one sense.  I am
interested in the recognition aspect and not in what does or noes not
make for retention of a test image in memory.

Pinkfreud, I note that the study you cite was specifically about
"response to a sequence of pleasurable stimuli" and that it did not
seem to have to do with memory but with things that were defined in
advance as being appealing.  When it comes to enjoyable experiences,
it seems plain that variety adds something desirable, but against this
we have the fact that people very obviously have favorite dishes,
favorite flavors, and favorite recipes, even though most anyone would
say, "I wouldn't want to have it all the time."  I didn't see any
memory connection there, though, so it isn't about the phenomenon of
recognition.  I was positing specifically that recognition (as a
result of a pattern match) triggers pleasure and not that it is the
only way of triggering pleasure.

These studies appear to be in the right general area, and maybe they
will lead to something that is right on target for me, but we're not
there yet.  Sorry to be such a tough customer, guys, but if I could
answer my own questions readily, I wouldn't be a GA regular.

Apteryx