Gay men just as bad as women for navigational abilities, research finds
Both share the same poor sense of direction and rely on local landmarks to get around, a study suggests.
They are also slower to take in spatial information than heterosexual men.
How this relates to parking a car — a task women famously struggle with, according to the stereotype — is open to question.
But researchers say it is likely to make driving in a strange environment more challenging for gay men and women than for straight male motorists.
Psychologists at Queen Mary, University of London, conducted computer-based tests of spatial learning and memory on 140 volunteers recruited through advertisements in newspapers and magazines.
They showed that gay men, straight women and lesbians navigated in much the same way and shared the same weaknesses. But there were also differences between gay and heterosexual men and straight and lesbian women.
The Queen Mary team, led by Dr Qazi Rahman, used virtual reality simulations of two common tests of spatial learning and memory developed at Yale University. In one, the Morris Water Maze (MWM) test, volunteers were placed in a “virtual pool” and had to “swim” through a maze to find a hidden submerged platform. Cues were sited in different places.
The other task, the radial arm maze test (RAM), involved finding “rewards” — musical tones — by exploring eight “arms” radiating out from a circular central junction. Four arms contained a reward and four did not, and participants had to avoid traversing an arm more than once.
During the MWM test, gay men and straight women took significantly longer to find the hidden platform than straight men and lesbians.
But the performance of gay and straight men did not differ in the RAM test.
They also behaved the same way in the water maze test once the rough location of the platform had been established. Gay and straight men both spent more time in the area searching for the platform than straight women and lesbians.
“This might mean that sexual orientation affects the speed at which you acquire spatial information, but not necessarily your eventual memory for that spatial information,” said Dr Rahman.
