The Science Behind the Dress
Nearly three months after the infamous blue and black dress (or was it white and gold?) tore the Internet apart, three teams of scientists have provided a closer look at the science behind the viral phenomenon. In their papers, published Thursday in the journal Current Biology, the teams have proposed reasons that different people saw different colors, and what the whole thing means for our understanding of visual perception.
In one study, Michael Webster, a psychologist from the University of Nevada, Reno, places blame for Dressgate on the ambiguity of the color blue, and people’s inability to reliably discern blue objects from blue lighting. He said that our vision was good at telling if we were looking at a white paper in red light, or a red paper in white light, but that process did not work easily for all colors, and blue tends to be problematic.
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In the second study, Karl Gegenfurtner, a psychologist from Giessen University in Germany, had 15 volunteers use a customizable color wheel to show what color they saw on the dress. He found that the pixels of the dress matched with the natural spectrum of blues and yellows we see from sunup to sundown, making it more difficult for people looking at it to tell how the color of the lighting might affect perception.
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In the third study, Bevil Conway, a neuroscientist from Wellesley College, asked more than 1,400 people what colors they saw when they looked at the dress. Included in their sample were 300 people who had not seen the dress before. He found that people fell into not only the two warring groups, “blue and black” and “white and gold,” but also a third group: “blue and brown.” He also found that older people tended to see white and gold while younger people saw blue and black.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/15/science/the-science-behind-the-dress-color.html?_r=0