Women and gay men are likely to be the worst drivers, a new study has shown.
Research has revealed that both perform poorly in tasks involving navigation and spatial awareness when compared to heterosexual men.
Psychologists at Queen Mary, University of London, who conducted the study, believe the findings mean driving in a strange environment would be more difficult for gay men and women than for straight male motorists.
Both tend to rely on local landmarks to get around, and are also slower to take in spatial information.
The computer-based tests were carried out on 140 volunteers, and demonstrated that gay men, straight women and lesbians navigated in a similar way, sharing the same weaknesses.
The results back earlier studies supporting the stereotype that women are poor navigators.
Although women are more successful in tests requiring them to remember the position of objects, men consistently do better in tasks requiring navigation and uncovering hidden objects.
The research 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, volunteers had to swim through an underwater maze to find a hidden platform, while the second involved exploring radial arms projecting from a central junction to receive 'rewards' .
Dr Rahman said: "Men are good at using distal, or geometrical cues, to decide if they're going north or south, for instance. They have a better basic sense of direction, but they can use local land marks as well.
"Driving in a novel environment which is poor in cues is where these differences are likely to show up most.
"Women are going to take a lot longer to reach their destination, making more errors, taking wrong turns etc. They need more rich local landmarks."
Dr Rahman added that a similar performance between gay and straight men in the radial arms test showed that the divisions between sexual groups were 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," he said.
And for those who don't subscribe to Hippocampus for some reason or other I put the study up here. OK, there's not a word about driving in it, but academics have to get publicity somehow.
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I thought the stereotype was women were better navigators. Oh well, they at least ask for directions still.
I can say from my limited experience, that the young women in sporty compact hatchbacks scare me more than the elderly or the chav boys in souped up Vauxhall Novas. I had yet another fucktard tail-gating me at 60 MPH in her new Mini from work. I'd just have to tap the brakes and I'd be peeling her off my inner windscreen.
In general I find driving in the south far more prone to issues than up north. I should start a notebook listing how many cars drive with one working headlight or have drivers who are simply too dumb to grasp the concept of indicators.
Admiral Valdemar wrote:I thought the stereotype was women were better navigators. Oh well, they at least ask for directions still.
i'm utterly convinced that was made up by men to keep women out of the driver's chair - the same way the fat kids in school were told to play in defence. My wife mixes up "left" and "right" - we have to do "my side" and "your side".
"what huge and loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx originally carven to represent? Accursed is the sight, be it in dream or not, that revealed to me the supreme horror - the Unknown God of the Dead, which licks its colossal chops in the unsuspected abyss, fed hideous morsels by soulless absurdities that should not exist" - Harry Houdini "Under the Pyramids"
"The goal of science is to substitute facts for appearances and demonstrations for impressions" - John Ruskin, "Stones of Venice"
Women claim to be more mature navigators because they will actually ask for directions, while a man will tend to rely on his superior spatial awareness to try and navigate his own way out of a jam.
Logically, if this study is valid (and there's no reason to think it isn't, since it's not the first study finding differentiations in spatial awareness), the ideal navigator would be a heterosexual man who is mature enough to stop and ask for directions if he gets lost.
Or, to put it another way, women will stop to ask for directions, which is a good thing. The problem is, they won't be able to use the directions they get.
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Lower spatial awareness in general is a trait 'zomg women multitask better' braggats convieniently forget. When the difference is 'men have a greater capability to visualise in two or three dimensions and the confidence thus gained leads a few ignorant individuals to not ask for directions in front of their harridian wives' and 'women ask for directions but have a poor ability to visualise the resultant information', it becomes clear that any man who isn't a stereotypical blue-collar idiot is a fine navigator.
Has anyone REALLY seen guys not ask for directions? I mean, my dad doesn't like doing it, but he's like me and looks at fucking maps beforehand and knows where he's going (and he's 55 so he's old-school). Nobody remotely my age demonstrates this behaviour outside of comedy movies and slasher films. The whole 'no dear I won't ask for directions I prefer to drive around the same three blocks forever' cliche seems baseless to me.
Stark wrote:Has anyone REALLY seen guys not ask for directions? I mean, my dad doesn't like doing it, but he's like me and looks at fucking maps beforehand and knows where he's going (and he's 55 so he's old-school). Nobody remotely my age demonstrates this behaviour outside of comedy movies and slasher films. The whole 'no dear I won't ask for directions I prefer to drive around the same three blocks forever' cliche seems baseless to me.
Sadly, yes. Around 10 years ago, I think, I was mowing my parents' lawn when a couple in their 50's drove by and they were having a good argument with each other. 5 minutes later the car goes around again, and I caught the words "lost" and "directions" being screamed by the woman. The car came around again a few minutes later and I heard the man yelling "I'm not lost!" after the woman screamed at him to stop and ask for directions. The car went around the block a few more times before they stopped and asked my neighbours for directions. They must have gone around my block nearly 10 times in total.
As for my friends, yeah we sometimes take a wrong turn, but it's pretty hard to get truly lost in our city. Drive a few minutes and you'll come to a main north-south or east-west street, and from there you can reorient yourself without too much difficulty and get back on course to your destination. If I somehow get really disoriented, I'll pull off the street near an intersection then check the maps in my car to find out where I am and how to get to where I'm going.
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Say, do you want it to be a threesome with your wife? Or a foursome with your wife and sister-in-law? I'm up for either.
Stark wrote:Has anyone REALLY seen guys not ask for directions? I mean, my dad doesn't like doing it, but he's like me and looks at fucking maps beforehand and knows where he's going (and he's 55 so he's old-school). Nobody remotely my age demonstrates this behaviour outside of comedy movies and slasher films. The whole 'no dear I won't ask for directions I prefer to drive around the same three blocks forever' cliche seems baseless to me.
Sadly, yes. Around 10 years ago, I think, I was mowing my parents' lawn when a couple in their 50's drove by and they were having a good argument with each other. 5 minutes later the car goes around again, and I caught the words "lost" and "directions" being screamed by the woman. The car came around again a few minutes later and I heard the man yelling "I'm not lost!" after the woman screamed at him to stop and ask for directions. The car went around the block a few more times before they stopped and asked my neighbours for directions. They must have gone around my block nearly 10 times in total.
As for my friends, yeah we sometimes take a wrong turn, but it's pretty hard to get truly lost in our city. Drive a few minutes and you'll come to a main north-south or east-west street, and from there you can reorient yourself without too much difficulty and get back on course to your destination. If I somehow get really disoriented, I'll pull off the street near an intersection then check the maps in my car to find out where I am and how to get to where I'm going.
Did you just say that men dont ask for directions, and then say that you stop and look at a map for directions?
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Don't be a dumbass. He related a personal anecdote that asnwered my 'does anyone really see this happen outside movies' question, and then described his own navigation experience.
Darth Wong wrote:Or, to put it another way, women will stop to ask for directions, which is a good thing. The problem is, they won't be able to use the directions they get.
I can personally vouch for that, having just seen it with my brother's girlfriend this Xmas trying to get to our new place.
I'm surprised that gay men were found to be more in the woman group. One wouldn't think that sexual orientation would have that much effect on brain wiring or whatever makes for these differences.
Given that, I wonder whether there's a difference between various countries and cultures. Perhaps Chinese women are better navigators than Western women, but Arab men are worse than Western men, etc, to pull two examples out of my behind.
Most of the time I'll get nervous and think I'm lost, and then when I stop and ask for directions it turns out I was going the right way and just needed to go a little further.
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Feil wrote:I'm surprised that gay men were found to be more in the woman group. One wouldn't think that sexual orientation would have that much effect on brain wiring or whatever makes for these differences.
Aren't you putting the cart before the horse? Wouldn't the brain wiring affect both sexual orientation and navigation, rather than sexual orientation affecting brain wiring which then affects navigation?
It's obviously not the be all and end all of gender-related differences in spacial cognition, but it's one of those things that has to be factored in. Humans have a rather obnoxious way of failing to live up to their potential when social pressures tell them they shouldn't.
No, I'm not making excuses for those who would favor political correctness over science; that would be stupid. I've just noticed that the media likes to do a bit of wanking with cognitive differences between the sexes. And also, this is the Telegraph, which has brought us such abominations as this dreadfully inaccurate article about Lawrence Krauss' recent statement on dark energy. I don't doubt the validity of the research in question, but the article may get things wrong.
Ghetto edit: shit, I missed the link to the study. Never mind what I said about the Telegraph article. I'll see what the PDF has to say.
OT: does anyone find it interesting that articles on sex-related differences in spatial cognition are always written by female journalists? Just something I've noticed.
My dad can be impatient, but he does look at the maps first and then ask any locals given they will have superior knowledge of an alien area. If he had been like the typical man portrayed in the media, then I'd have never made my job interview last year. Fortunately, even someone like my father can see what sense asking makes and add that to superior map reading skills.
Admiral Valdemar wrote:In general I find driving in the south far more prone to issues than up north. I should start a notebook listing how many cars drive with one working headlight or have drivers who are simply too dumb to grasp the concept of indicators.
I'd blame that one on evolution and natural selection. It snows up here, thus the truly horrible drivers are far more likely remove themselves from the gene pool, upping the average skill of drivers in general.
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