Sexual orientation is related to cognitive performance, according to new research that examined data from 254,231 individuals. The study indicates that cognitive skills are shifted in the direction of the opposite sex in homosexual men and women.
The findings appear in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.
“This topic could help us further understand the causal models of sexual orientation development, such as the prenatal androgen theory. This theory predicts that homosexual men and women should behave in the direction of their opposite-sex heterosexual peers in neurological correlates (cognitive function here) where sex differences are typically found,” explained study author Yin Xu of King’s College London
“This is hypothesized to be due to the actions of prenatal sex hormones upon developing brain mechanisms underlying both sexual orientation and its behavioral correlates.”
Many studies have documented sex-based differences in cognitive abilities. Heterosexual men tend to outperform heterosexual women on tasks related to mental rotation, spatial perception, spatial visualization, spatial orientation, and spatial learning. Heterosexual women, on the other hand, tend to outperform heterosexual men on tasks related to verbal fluency, perceptual speed, facial emotion recognition, and object location memory.
After analyzing data from 32 studies published between 1980 and 2017 that had examined the association between cognitive performance and sexual orientation, the researchers found a cross-sex shift in cognitive performance among homosexual individuals. In other words, homosexual men exhibited spatial and verbal abilities that were more typical of heterosexual women, while homosexual women exhibited spatial abilities that were more typical of heterosexual men.
“We found that homosexual men performed like heterosexual women in both male-favoring (e.g., spatial cognition) and female-favoring (e.g., verbal fluency) cognitive tests, while homosexual women performed like heterosexual men only in male-favoring tests. However, the magnitude of the sexual orientation difference varied across cognitive domains,” Xu told PsyPost.
In line with other research on sex differences in cognition, the researchers found small-to-moderate effect sizes, meaning there was a large overlap between the groups.
“Our results are also silent on whether basic differences in processes such as attention, executive, or sensorimotor function, and learning and differential socialization are responsible for the sexual orientation differences in higher cognitive functions. In addition, the methodological variation (e.g., cognitive domains, exclusivity of homosexuality) we explored could only be attributed partially to the heterogeneity between studies included in our meta-analysis,” Xu said.
The study, “Sexual orientation and neurocognitive ability: A meta-analysis in men and women“, was authored by Yin Xu, Sam Norton, and Qazi Rahman.