We know, you thought the whole #DressGate thing was over and you were glad. But rather than being a simple Internet meme on the scale of dancing babies and funny cats, The Dress is helping neuroscientists understand the way that the human brain perceives and thinks.
Like most, you probably cast your vote for black & blue or white & gold, got annoyed by others, and then dropped the issue from your mind. However, three research papers discussion cognition and perception in light of The Dress have just been published in the journal Current Biology. In other words, the scientific community thinks The Dress has a lot more to offer us than lunchroom fodder.
So, why do the experts think The Dress matters? Because the image can help researchers understand how a single image can be perceived so differently by so many. If The Dress looks blue and black to you, you're in the majority camp with about 57 percent of people surveyed in one of the studies. This is also its color in person. If you see white and gold, you're in a healthy minority-about 30 percent saw it that way. Another 11 percent saw The Dress as blue and brown, while 2 percent described it as "other."
The three research papers approach the issue in unique ways. Michael A. Webster of the University of Nevada argues that blue has a "special ambiguity" and that the same debate could never erupt over a dress in a more stable color like red. Different colors are more or less vulnerable to being perceived differently based on the presence of natural light. The human brain confuses actual blue color with blue light in the sky, and then adjusts for this by "seeing" something blue as something white.
Karl Gegenfurtner of Giessen University in Germany approached the issue by parsing out the exact shades seen by the people surveyed. He found that there was not so much a dichotomy between blue and black people and white and gold people, but more of a continuum of perceptions ranging between the palest blue to pastel blue to a dark azure.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Wellesley College neuroscientist Bevil Conway presented results that acknowledged the presence of a continuum of perceptions but also found that among his 14,000 people surveyed most do call into either the blue and black or white and gold camps.
"This is one of the first [documented] instances, if not the first, of people looking at exactly the same physical thing and seeing very different colors," says Conway. "The dress is a very powerful tool for understanding how the brain resolves ambiguity. All images that hit your retina are ambiguous, so there's a lot of [scientific] interest in how internal models shape how you experience the patterns of life. We really thought everybody had the same internal model."
Interestingly, Conway's work also shows significant correlations between color perception and gender and age. Women and older people are more likely to see white and gold, which means they more frequently possess internal auto-correcting models to help their brains make the distinction. Why?
Because things like gender and age determine where you spend your time, and when. The more exposure you have to either blue or orange light, the more your internal models are affected. Outdoor light is more contaminated by blue light, so if you spend daylight hours outside you will be more likely to correct to white and gold. If you spend your daylight hours inside under artificial light you're more likely to discount orange light which artificial lighting produces. This makes you correct to black and blue.
"All the objects you look at are contaminated by the light source," Conway says. "The sky is blue, it beams down on objects, the objects are contaminated by blue light. The other is incandescent light - direct sunlight or traditional electric lights - which has a bias to orange. Older people and women are more likely to spend their waking hours during daylight."
And these three papers are likely just the first on the subject of The Dress. Conway believes The Dress will continue to be studied for years: "It's clearly a crappy picture, but it turns out to be an extraordinarily powerful tool for visual neuroscientists. There will be dozens and dozens of papers about it over the years. This is just the beginning."
The Dress matters because it may help us to answer crucial questions: "The dress is going to continue to be a very important probe for understanding the fundamental problem of how the brain turns data into perception and cognition: how do you turn the stuff that hits your senses into something actionable, a perception or thought?"
