New Delhi, Oct. 4: Night vision technology has helped scientists overturn a popular belief that women become sexually aroused slower than men. A new study by researchers in Canada has shown that the speed of arousal is nearly equal in men and women.

The study, presented on Saturday at a medical conference in Ottawa, is being described as the first to use thermal imaging technology in an experiment designed to measure and compare sexual arousal rates in men and women.

“We see that there is no difference in the amount of time it takes healthy young men and women to reach peak arousal,” said Irv Binik, professor of psychology at the Royal Victoria Hospital.

Thermal imaging technology uses special cameras that measure infrared radiation emitted by objects from a distance and has been in use for years for night vision devices that sense heat from objects to “see” in the dark.

The researchers asked men and women volunteers to separately watch sexually-explicit films. As the volunteers watched the films, the researchers focused thermal imaging cameras on their genital regions to measure fractional changes in the temperature associated with physiological changes linked to arousal.

The observations showed that both men and women began showing arousal in 30 seconds. The men reached maximum arousal in an average time of 665 seconds, while women achieved it in about 743 seconds. The researchers said the difference was “statistically negligible”.