Blue and black or white and gold? Scientists are on the case. (Photo: Tumblr)
Yes, “The Dress” has made the news again, but now it’s taken a scientific turn.
Three papers on the is-it-gold-and-white-or-is-it-blue-and-black debate have been published in the recent issue of the journal Current Biology.
“When The Dress first came out and was shown to the world, I thought it was social media fluff,” Bevel Conway,
a professor of neuroscience at Wellesley College and an author to one
of the studies, tells Yahoo Health. “But actually, it has taken the
scientific community by a far greater, if so, burning storm than it did
for the popular media.”
Here’s what The Dress really looks like. (Photo: Via romanoriginals.co.uk)
Conway’s
experiment consisted of 1,400 adults, where over 300 of the
participants had never looked at The Dress prior to the study. He and
his team discovered that people fell into three different groups — the
white/gold camp, the blue/black camp and a smaller blue/brown camp. And
they could also be divided by age and sex: they found that older people
and women were more likely to see The Dress as white and gold, while the
younger volunteers were more likely to see the garment as being black
and blue. “The blue/brown group were not as common as everybody else,
but they’re a significant group and I have to stick up for them because
I’m one of them!” he adds.
“The
leading hypothesis is one that I put out there when The Dress first
came on the scene, which is that people have different internal models,
and that the color correction algorithm that we have in our brains works
differently in different people,” Conway continues. “And that comes
about because of the exposure that people have to different lighting
situations.”
He
then explains how challenging it is for a camera to capture the true
color of an image. “Every single photograph that is taken requires some
color correction because the connection between wave length stimulus and
color is not a reflex — it’s not like that wave length equals that
color. This is the main reason why photography was so hard to develop —
because the investors had to figure out how to get the film to reproduce
closely enough what you had experienced.”
Yes, someone got a “The Dress” tattoo. ( Photo: Imgur)
And
there are tiny computers inside our cameras, which are trying to
interpret the correct colors and lighting conditions. “So in this
particular case, the illumination conditions were basically confused to
the color correction algorithm in the camera,” continues Conway. “So you
end up with this very peculiar photograph where the only components in
it, the objective pixel colors, are blues and browns. And those two
colors just happen to be the colors we associate with natural
illuminance.”
Which
leads us into the second study, conduced in Germany. The researchers
concludes that all of the colors observed by their 15 participants are
similar to the colors found in daylight, which supports previous works
on how the eye perceives natural sunlight.
The
third experiment was comprised of 87 college-aged students from the
University of Nevada, Reno. Researchers asked them what color they saw
when looking at the light-blue stripes — half reported blue while half
reported white. Then the investigators manipulated the image so that the
black stripes appeared blue and the blue stripes appeared gold. And 95
percent of the students reported seeing yellow or gold.
The
study author, a cognitive scientist named Michael Webster, concluded
that our eyes are likely to confuse blue objects with blue lighting and —
similar to the German research — has to do with how our eyes translates
in the presence of natural light from the sun and the sky.
Conway,
of Wellesley, points out that his paper is “entirely correlational and
circumstantial, so we need to do a lot more experiments to prove this
idea. But The Dress is possibly one of the most effective tools we now
have for studying that internal color correction mechanism that we have
in our head.”
And so the phenomenon continues.
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