Sexual orientation affects some tasks

WARWICK, England, May 24 (UPI) -- 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.