What Color Are My Clothes? Part 3

Apparently I'm in good company when it comes to not knowing the color of some cloth. Nearly 30 million people are in on the debate about this dress. If you haven't seen it yet, look at the photo and answer the question, "What color is this dress?" before reading any further.

The dress has sparked a Pantone civil war that's spilled off of the internet and into people's private lives. One camp declares it to be blue and black, another decreees white and gold. I myself saw blue and grey, but then the suggestion that the grey was black makes me see it as black.

I'm not interested in the gossip, how this dress broke the internet or destroyed relationships, or even what Taylor Swift has to say about it (what is she a mantis shrimp or something?) What truly interests me is the science behind the dispute. 

Somewhere in the murky depths of BuzzFeed is an explanation for the debate stating that, "it’s not monitor settings" because two people can see it on the same screen and perceive different things. BuzzFeed also says, "It’s probably not about the cells in your eyes," (unless you have a retinal condition like me, in which case retinal cells might be a factor), and then goes on to explain how our brains are always deciding what they're seeing.

“In the case of the dress, some people are deciding that there is a fair amount of illumination on a blue and black (or less reflective) dress," says Cedar Riener, a professor of psychology at Randolph-Macon College. "Other people are deciding that it is less illumination on a white/gold dress (it is in shadow, but more reflective).”

These differences in perception are based on individual experiences and "top-down" processing in the brain. Cognitive neuroscientist John Borghi of Rockefeller University explains, “It could also be that you’ve seen dresses (or fabric) with the same texture or shape before, which could also affect your perception.”

Here's what Adobe has to say about the dress,
though when I did this on a photo of my
sweatshirt, the results were inaccurate.

Aside from all of us having wasted tens of millions of person-hours on what's really just a shoddy photo of a nice dress, I'm glad people are talking about this because top-down cognitive processing has bigger societal implications than mere disagreements about colors of clothes. I touched on this in earlier posts about cultural astigmatism, race, and posted a clip that postulates that people can look right at something and not see it. In each of these posts I discussed how our prior experiences and cultural preferences have us constantly deciding what we each see when we look at the same subject.

Today online, that debate is about the color of a dress. Another day in the street it may be about the color of someone's skin and what that means to me or you or someone who holds power over that hypothetical person. Our experiences compose our vision, our vision comprises our perception, and our perceptions influence our actions. Look forward to more dialogue on this soon.