The photo of the dress just happens to hit the sweet spot of ambiguity in terms of lighting and shading. There are lots of this type of illusion – is it a young girl or old woman, which way are the cubes facing, do you see a wine glass or two faces, etc.
Our brains can make different assumptions to “see” the girl spinning clockwise or counterclockwise. Remember the spinning girl illusion? This remains one of my most popular posts, for the same reason this dress controversy has gone viral. Ambiguous optical illusions are ones in which our brains are given conflicting information, or there are different ways to resolve the image that are equally valid. The dress is a similar color constancy illusion, but is also an ambiguous stimuli illusion. Our brains perceive them differently because of the surrounding colors, which force our brains to make different assumptions about shading, and therefore they correct the color in opposite directions. The blue and green stripes are actually the exact same color. It makes assumptions about shading, and then corrects for the shadow effect, so that we correctly perceive the light squares as light, even when they are in shadow.īelow is a really intense color illusion. The shade of squares A and B are identical, but our brains see them as light and dark. Here is a black and white version of this illusion – the checkerboard illusion. In order to perceive the item as the single continuous thing that it is, our brains evolved color and shading correction algorithms White, for example, will appear blue in dark light, but our brains still see white – it corrects the blue perception into white. This might trick a perceptive system into thinking that one item is actual multiple items, divided along lines of shade and light. The actual color that falls upon our retina will change dramatically in different lighting conditions.
If we see a tiger running through a sun-dappled forest, it’s important that we perceive a constant entity, not a morphing and changing image. Our brains evolved to favor consistency over accuracy, in both memory and perception. The type of illusion is called color constancy. At the same time she is caps-lock-certain that her perception of the dress’s color is the objective truth. She thinks it must be a trick (it is – a trick of the brain), and is scared and confused. “I don’t understand this odd dress debate and feel like it’s a trick somehow. The reason, in my opinion, this has gone so viral so quickly is that people are legitimately freaked out by the realization that how they see the world is ultimately a subjective construction of our brains. It does not seem to be an issue with the monitor or viewing conditions. I see black and blue, no matter what screen or version of that picture I look at. Right now there are about 2 million votes, so that is probably statistically significant. Buzzfeed has a poll which currently puts it at 72% white and gold, and 28% black and blue. There is now an intense debate going on in the intertubes over whether this dress is black and blue or white and gold. This is pretty amazing – almost as much for how quickly this has gone viral as for the effect itself.
0 kommentar(er)
