Close your Eyes While Kissing? Study Tells Why

One of the greatest mysteries of human psyche is, why do we close our eyes while sharing a kiss? The psychologists from Royal Holloway, University of London, explain that the when people kiss, it becomes difficult for the brain to process sensation if the it is also engaged in comprehending what it is seeing.
"Tactile awareness depends on the level of perceptual load in a concurrent visual task," said Polly Dalton and Sandra Murphy, from University of London, in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.

The psychologists arrived at their study findings without actually examining kissing people. Instead, the study participants were made to go through visual tests and at the same time, their response to something touching was being assessed.

The researchers discovered that the visual field supersedes physical response, that is people will find it hard to continue kissing if it becomes difficult to process what they were looking at.

Dr. Dalton told The Sunday Times: "If we are focusing strongly on a visual task, this will reduce our awareness of stimuli in other senses.
"It is important for designers to be aware of these effects, because auditory and tactile alerts are often used in situations of high visual demand, such as driving a car or flying an aircraft."

This is also the reason why most people shut their eyes when they are dancing or reading braille.

Dr. Dalton also said, "These results could explain why we close our eyes when we want to focus attention on another sense. Shutting out the visual input leaves more mental resources to focus on other aspects of our experience."

Dr. Sandra Murphy, co-researcher of the study, added "It was already known that increasing the demands of a visual task could reduce noticing of visual and auditory stimuli.

"Our research extends this finding to the sense of touch. This is particularly important given the growing use of tactile information in warning systems.

"For example, some cars now provide tactile alerts when they begin drifting across lanes - our research suggests that drivers will be less likely to notice these alerts when engaging in demanding visual tasks such as searching for directions at a busy junction."