Focus on The dress and explain the Scientific explanations.
There is no consensus on why the dress elicits such discordant perceptions. The neuroscientists Bevil Conway and Jay Neitz believe they are a result of how the human brain perceives colour and chromatic adaptation. Conway believes it is connected to how the brain processes the various hues of a daylight sky: "Your visual system is looking at this thing, and you're trying to discount the chromatic bias of the daylight axis ... people either discount the blue side, in which case they end up seeing white and gold, or discount the gold side, in which case they end up with blue and black." Neitz said:Our visual system is supposed to throw away information about the illuminant and extract information about the actual reflectance ... but I've studied individual differences in colour vision for 30 years, and this is one of the biggest individual differences I've ever seen.
Similar theories have been expounded by the University of Liverpool's Paul Knox, who stated that what the brain interprets as colour may be affected by the device the photograph is viewed on, or the viewer's own expectations. Anya Hurlbert and collaborators also considered the problem from the perspective of colour perception. They attributed the differences in perception to individual perception of colour constancy.The neuroscientist and psychologist Pascal Wallisch states that while inherently ambiguous stimuli have been known to vision science for many years, this is the first such stimulus in the colour domain that was brought to the attention of science by social media. He attributes differential perceptions to differences in illumination and fabric priors, but also notes that the stimulus is highly unusual insofar as the perception of most people does not switch. If it does, it does so only on very long time scales, which is highly unusual for bistable stimuli, so perceptual learning might be at play. In addition, he says that discussions of this stimulus are not frivolous, as the stimulus is both of interest to science and a paradigmatic case of how different people can sincerely see the world differently. Daniel Hardiman-McCartney of the College of Optometrists stated that the picture was ambiguous, suggesting that the illusion was caused by a strong yellow light shining onto the dress, and human perception of the colours of the dress and light source by comparing them with other colours and objects in the picture. The philosopher Barry C. Smith compared the phenomenon with Ludwig Wittgenstein and the rabbit–duck illusion, although the rabbit-duck illusion is an ambiguous image where, for most people, the alternative perceptions switch very easily.
The Journal of Vision, a scientific journal about vision research, announced in March 2015 that a special issue about the dress would be published with the title A Dress Rehearsal for Vision Science. The first large-scale scientific study on the dress was published in Current Biology three months after the image went viral. The study, which involved 1,400 respondents, found that 57 per cent saw the dress as blue and black, 30 per cent saw it as white and gold, 11 per cent saw it as blue and brown, and two per cent reported it as "other". Women and older people disproportionately saw the dress as white and gold. The researchers further found that if the dress was shown in artificial yellow-coloured lighting almost all respondents saw the dress as black and blue, while they saw it as white and gold if the simulated lighting had a blue bias. Another study in the Journal of Vision, by Pascal Wallisch, found that people who were early risers were more likely to think the dress was lit by natural light, perceiving it as white and gold, and that "night owls" saw the dress as blue and black.A study carried out by Schlaffke et al. reported that individuals who saw the dress as white and gold showed increased activity in the frontal and parietal regions of the brain. These areas are thought to be critical in higher cognition activities such as top-down modulation in visual perception.
Journal of Vision Ludwig Wittgenstein Current Biology Anya Hurlbert Bevil Conway chromatic adaptation rabbit–duck illusion vision science colour perception ambiguous image perceives colour Jay Neitz social media daylight University of Liverpool Barry C. Smith College of Optometrists colour constancy