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When The Dress became viral in 2015 – bringing tens of millions of online viewers to realize that the garment was blue and black or white and gold – it not only broke the Internet, it broke the color science as the researchers had designed it up to this point.
Never before have scientists observed such differences of opinion about the color of an object. A popular assumption explaining why people saw the dress differently was color consistency – a perceptual phenomenon in which an object seems to remain more or less the same color, regardless of the lighting conditions in which you see it. This is an incredible feature of human vision, although researchers have been using it for a long time against you in the form of visual illusions. Take this photo, for example, which was created by the Japanese psychologist Akiyoshi Kitaoka:
The berries look red, right? They are not. In fact, there are no red pixels in this image. Go ahead, check. Try using your hands or a few sheets of paper to cover everything except a burst of strawberry. Trippy, no?
As with dress, the consistency of color comes into play. But unlike this dress, almost everyone perceives Kitaoka berries as red. There is no ambiguity, no fervent disagreement, no philosophical crisis. Just a captivating disappointment, but also robust: even when you know that there are no red pixels, you can not help but see the berries in red.
The illusion of the dress was similarly sturdy. Most. People who saw the outfit as blue and black tended to only see it as blue and black. But the dress could also be mercurial. From time to time, without warning, colors perceived by a perceived person may change, causing existential spasms and additional scientific intrigues.
For the final episode of our science of illusions series, we invited David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Stanford, to help us fight color consistency: how does it help you see the true color of your body? an object, even in a changing light? how it also makes you susceptible to deception; and what researchers may think in viral pictures of ambiguous color illusions such as The Dress. Or the shoes. (What? Do not tell me you did not see The Shoes …)
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