|
Researcher: Gay Men Behave Like Women
by 365Gay.com Newscenter Staff
Posted: January 3, 2008 - 5:00 pm ET
(London) Gay men navigate in a similar way
to women, according to a new study from researchers at Queen Mary, University of
London.
In a new study published this week in the journal Hippocampus, Dr Qazi Rahman,
from Queen Mary’s School of Biological and Chemical Sciences used virtual
reality scenarios to investigate if spatial learning and memory in humans can be
linked to sexual orientation.
Differences in spatial learning and memory - our ability to record and recall
information about our environment - are common between men and women. It has
been shown that men consistently outperform women on tasks requiring navigation
and discovering hidden objects; whereas women are more successful at tests which
require them to remember where those objects lie in a particular space.
This is the first study to investigate if those differences are also true for
gay, lesbian and straight individuals.
Dr Rahman used virtual reality stimulations of two common tests of spatial
learning and memory, designed by researchers at Yale University. In the Morris
Water Maze test (MWM), participants found themselves in a virtual pool and had
to escape as quickly as possible using spatial clues in the virtual room to find
a hidden platform. In the Radial Arm Maze test (RAM), participants had to
traverse eight ‘arms’ from a circular junction to find hidden rewards. Four
of the arms contained a reward, four did not.
Dr Rahman and his research assistant, Johanna Koerting, found that during the
MWM test gay men and straight women took longer to find the hidden platform than
did straight men. However, both gay and straight men spent more of their
“dwelling time” in the area where the hidden platform actually was, compared
to straight and lesbian women.
Dr Rahman explains: “Not only did straight men get started on the MWM test
more quickly than gay men and the two female groups, they also maintained that
advantage throughout the test. 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.
“In previous studies we have also found that gay men tend to use similar
navigation strategies to women, like using land-marks, and we now want to
explore whether navigation strategies on these virtual navigation tasks are also
the same for gay men and women. In particular, we are interested in whether
heterosexual men are using a unique strategy from their first attempt at
traversing a new environment, which accounts for why they are so quick off the
mark.”
The researchers also found that gay and straight men were similar in their
performance on the Radial Arm Maze. “This suggests that sexual variation in
spatial cognition is not straightforward – gay people appear to show a
‘mosaic’ of performance, parts of which are male-like and other parts of
which are female-like,” adds Rahman.
Dr Rahman also commented that it would be interesting to see if these sexual
differences change with age. “We know that spatial ability declines more
rapidly in men with age than in women, and this might be related to changing
hormone profiles. This may have some relevance to sex differences in
ageing-related diseases of cognitive functioning, such as dementia.
“If we can understand more about how people of different sexes and sexualities
differ in spatial performance, we might be able to tailor cognitive remediation
therapies more effectively to specific groups within an ageing population.”
©365Gay.com 2008
|
Entertainment
