Seeing Black And Blue Or White And Gold? Three Perspectives On How We Perceive "The Dress"

Table of Content

• This May Be Why You’re Seeing the Dress as White and Gold
• NOW WATCH: What goes on in your brain when you get déjà vu
• This cartoon is the simplest explanation of the color-changing dress
• White And Gold Or Blue And Black? Scientists Explain Why Everyone Sees The Dress Differently
• Unzipping the Little Black Dress

The illusion is thought to occur because the human brain interprets colors differently in different lighting conditions. The white and gold dress illusion was an optical illusion that went viral on the internet in 2015. The illusion, which appeared to show a white and gold dress in different lighting conditions, caused a great deal of debate online, with many people arguing over what color the dress actually was.

I am currently doing research on the development of colour constancy in children within the Sussex Colour Group. Toddlers may experience a lower level of colour constancy than adults, making the world even more confusing for them. It has also been suggested that Monet was somehow able to disregard this automatic process in order to paint scenes showing how light progressed over the day. To most of us, the change in the colour of light over the day would be less noticeable. This is possibly something you’ve never thought about or been aware of before - you may well underestimate just how much the lighting in our world changes, because your brain compensates for it so well. In The Dress photo, there aren’t many cues or reference points to tell us the properties of the light source.

This May Be Why You’re Seeing the Dress as White and Gold

According to Science Daily, humans are blessed with something called color constancy, which means that while color should be easily identifiable whether you’re in bright or dull lighting, things can change if the lighting is colored. And night 'owls', whose world is illuminated not by the sun, but by long-wavelength artificial light will see black and blue. Put simply, 'larks' - people who rise and go to bed early and spend many of their waking hours in sunlight - are more likely to see the dress as white and gold. And night 'owls' - whose world is illuminated not by the sun, but by long-wavelength artificial light - see black and blue. And he found that 'larks' - people who rise and go to bed early and spend many of their waking hours in sunlight - are more likely to see the dress as white and gold. Researchers suggest that people who wake up earlier are significantly more likely to see the dress as white and gold, compared to those who love a lie-in.

Those who saw the dress as a blue-brown color probably assumed neutral lighting, the researchers said. In a new paper published in the Journal of Vision, New York University neuroscientist Pascal Wallisch, Ph.D., explains that the way a person perceives the color of the dress comes down to how they assume it is illuminated. He discovered that if people assumed the dress was lit by artificial light, they tended to think it was black and blue. However, if people believed the dress was just shadowed in natural light, they thought it was gold and white. Long ago, way back in 2015, “the dress” became a polarizing viral behemoth.

NOW WATCH: What goes on in your brain when you get déjà vu

The illusion was eventually explained by optical scientists, who determined that the dress was actually a blue and black dress that appeared to be white and gold due to the way the human brain processes color in different lighting conditions. The dress is a photograph that became a viral phenomenon on the Internet in 2015. Viewers of the image disagreed on whether the dress depicted was coloured black and blue, or white and gold. The phenomenon revealed differences in human colour perception, which have been the subject of ongoing scientific investigations into neuroscience and vision science, producing a number of papers published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Conway believes that these differences in perception may correspond to the type of light that individuals’ brains expect to be in their environment. For example, people who perceive “The Dress” as white and gold may have just been exposed to natural daylight, while those who saw a black and blue garment may spend most of their time surrounded by artificial light sources.

In the photo posted on Tumblr, the dress fills up most of the image, providing very little information about how the object is being lit. "The wide range of interpretations about how it's being illuminated leads to a wide range of interpretations about its intrinsic color," Williams said. In the case of the dress, the reason some people see it as different colors is not because they're colorblind, which is usually caused by a defect in a person's color cones, nor is it some fundamental difference in color vision, Williams said. "I think the brain has just made a different assumption about how the dress is being illuminated." The illumination can change dramatically depending on the time of day, or between incandescent and fluorescent lighting.

This cartoon is the simplest explanation of the color-changing dress

The dress was first worn by a woman named Caitlin McNeill, who posted a picture of it on her Tumblr account. Despite the scientific explanation, the white and gold dress illusion continues to be one of the most famous optical illusions of all time, and is a testament to the power of the human brain to see things that aren’t actually there. Some see blue and black stripes, others see white and gold stripes.

This striking variation took the internet by storm in February; now Current Biology is publishing three short papers on why the image is seen differently by different observers, and what this tells us about the complicated workings of color perception. If you were wondering how so many people disagreed on something as trivial as the color of an outfit, Wired produced a report on the science behind the confusion that gripped everyone on the internet regarding the photo. In the report, it was settled by the writer that the dress had to be blue and black, because Wired's photo team were able to use Photoshop to get down to the bottom of the mystery. The magazine's senior photo editor explained how the light and background in the photo tricked the eyes of so many people. The dress itself was confirmed as a royal blue "Lace Bodycon Dress" from the retailer Roman Originals, which was actually black and blue in colour; although available in three other colours , a white and gold version was not available at the time.

White And Gold Or Blue And Black? Scientists Explain Why Everyone Sees The Dress Differently

The brain automatically “processes” visual input before we consciously perceive it. Differences in this processing between people may underlie The Great Dress Debate. McNeill attended the wedding where the dress was worn by the mother of the bride.

It all depends on which information your brain decides to fill in. Most of what we perceive is actually not what we directly see, our brains do a lot of processing to fill in the blanks. But if you see blue and black you realize that the image is somewhat washed out.