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Thomas Frey - Senior Futurist at the DaVinci Institute
May 24th, 2007 at 11:58 pm

Gay People Make Lousy Map Readers

British researchers from the University of Warwick have found that sexual orientation affects performance in mental tasks, such as navigating with a map.

The researchers worked with the BBC to collect data from more than 198,000 people ages 20 to 65 years — 109,612 men and 88,509 women.

Men outperformed women on tests such as mentally rotating objects that would be used in real life to navigate with a map.

The study found that women outperformed men in verbal dexterity tests and remembering the locations of objects, according to the study published in Archives of Sexual Behaviour.

However, for a number of tasks the researchers found key differences across the range of sexual orientations studied.

For instance, in mental rotation — a task where men usually perform better — they found the best performance to worst was: heterosexual men, bisexual men, homosexual men, homosexual women, bisexual women and heterosexual women.

Via UPI

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