Remember That Blue and Black or White and Gold Dress? Well, Scientists Are Weighing In
Where’s Chestnut, this one’s for you. 🙂
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.”
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 was 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.”
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, conducted in Germany. The researchers conclude 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 co-relational 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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37 Comments
Mike Daemon
May 19, 04:53I cannot make sense of anything.. Damn ugly dress too.
#TeamKizito
May 19, 04:58Hmmm.
Nawa. This controversial dress can make certain people argue till death wins.
Samurai
May 19, 05:19You prefer discussing this ugly dress to giving us our next episode on Love and Sex in the City.
My God is watching you on HD TV.
Kontinuu!!
pete
May 19, 05:25Not this dress again
Max
May 19, 05:26Don’t worry Pinky, I’ll finish up my story soon.
This right here just gave me the jolt I needed.
pinkpanthertb
May 19, 05:30Oh? You saw a flash of Blue and Black and White and Gold?
Max
May 19, 07:33No, I saw why the piece was posted.
pinkpanthertb
May 19, 07:49You think you know something? Hon, you don’t. 🙂
Max
May 19, 08:00Now you’re “trying” to profile me. 🙂
How is that working out for you?
Brian Collins
May 19, 06:29I was just waiting for when it would say gay people saw it a different way.
pinkpanthertb
May 19, 06:38Hahahaahaahaaa. Oh Brian!
chestnut
May 19, 06:31I’m here ooooo! That thing is still white and gold biko!
pinkpanthertb
May 19, 06:39But…but… The scientists are saying…
Ringlana
May 19, 06:34Believe me when I say it all About Perception,.Micheal Webster is right.
Masked Man
May 19, 06:50Can’t believe I just read all of this.
Ugly out of trend dress.
pinkpanthertb
May 19, 06:58Lol. Who says its out of trend? Clearly it has trended its way into research institutes. Lol
Masked Man
May 19, 07:02Lol,
I am with Brian on this completely.
I would have waves gloriously to the high heavens if it was said that gays saw the cloth differently.
Teflondon
May 19, 06:57I never got the Fuzz about the cloth.. When it was trending.. After reading this article I still don’t get what it’s all abt.
And I can’t believe I just read this. Felt like my minutes were wasted.
Max
May 19, 07:35And you’re still here…
Its refreshing, seeing you as a man of your word.
Teflondon
May 19, 08:27I love you too Max.
wytem
May 19, 09:20Max n Tef, can you guys get started already? Exchange contacts for starters!!
trystham
May 19, 07:02Ohkay. But the dress has been worn? And it wasn’t a fashion faux pas???
pinkpanthertb
May 19, 07:03…It comes back with its fabric of many colours 😀
ketaninkorea
May 19, 07:05I’ve never seen “the dress” until now, and I don’t see what the big fuss is about. It’s a dress.
Masked Man
May 19, 07:32Korea?
Okay!!!
ketaninkorea
May 19, 07:33yeah, living over here I’m not up to date on Internet pop news from the US. haha!
Tobby
May 19, 07:14This dress again. *Yawns*
Sinnex
May 19, 07:46I am supposed to care because…?
handle
May 19, 08:40Am I not reading the same thing as everyone else? The paper is talking about color correction and how our eyes interpret natural lighting on objects and The dress being the best tool we could use to understand that. There are whole bunch on studies on this, how internal color correction mechanism works in humans, understanding that leads to improving computer vision.
who cares what color the dress is.
Brian Collins
May 19, 09:55The new face of geek is here. Hi handle.
handle
May 19, 08:43Am I not reading the same thing as everyone else? The paper is talking about color correction and how our eyes interpret natural lighting on objects and The dress being the best tool we could use to understand that. There are whole bunch on studies on this, how internal color correction mechanism works in humans, understanding that leads to improving computer vision.
who cares what color the dress is
Brian Collins
May 19, 09:57Who cares about improved computer vision? Are they going to add one more webcam so it can see like a human?
Ruby
May 19, 12:00Too. Cumbersome
Can’t Comprehend
Metrosexual
May 19, 16:05So what’s the final colour of the dress..
Brian Collins
May 19, 17:04Which ever you choose darlingg. Just pick one.
La-Coozee
May 19, 21:22Someone please kill this dress if it has a life.
La-Coozee
May 19, 21:25BTW, Pinkie Wintour lol. Please see your mail. Thank you sah