Homosexuals really do have a ‘gaydar’ that enables them to spot other gay people, scientists have revealed.
A study has discovered that gay men and women respond to detailed visual stimuli at least 40 milliseconds faster than their heterosexual counterparts.
Researchers believe that this increased attention to visual detail allows homosexual people to pick up ”perceptual cues” when they meet someone for the first time.
This ”gaydar mechanism” then helps them to correctly guess a stranger’s sexual orientation by analysing body movement, gesturing, style and speech patterns.
Dr Lorenza Colzato, assistant professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands, said he believes homosexual people are simply ”more analytic”.
She said: ”This is the first time that scientific proof has been found for the existence of a gaydar mechanism amongst homosexuals.
”Gay people were much faster at reacting correctly to our visual stimuli and they paid far more attention to the small details.
”This perceptual skill allows homosexuals to recognise other gay people faster and we think it’s because they are much more analytic than heterosexuals.”
Researchers presented a group of homosexual and heterosexual volunteers with a series of visual stimuli in January this year.
These included photographs of large letters made up of smaller letter, for example an ‘L’ comprised of many smaller images of the letter ‘B’.
Their reaction time to the stimuli was recorded and analysis revealed a significant 40 millisecond difference in reaction time between gay and straight people.
*The ”gaydar mechanism” study has appeared in the ‘Frontiers in Cognition’ scientific journal.
