Photo: wired
If you are aware of that dress that buzzed the internet yesterday. Do you think that the dress is in white-gold or blue-black? So what causes us to have different perception of the colour of the dress?
Hearing from a visual neuroscientist, the illusion is caused by “colour constancy”. It is the process by which we can recognise the same object under different light sources. Perhaps you might have came across the image of a Rubik’s Cube under different lighting conditions during your biopsychology or cognitive psychology class. Our brain does a computation of the lighting on the surface of the cube and calculates the surface properties of each based on the lighting properties. Hence, we might perceive the chip of a different hue as the same colour. This illusory process will help us to determine the colour of objects regardless of the light source.
Why would people see it differently? They are looking at the dress on different screens set to different brightnesses (or white balances). This is an optical issue of light transmission.
So this explains why different people see it differently: they are looking at it on different screens set to different brightnesses (or white balances). It has nothing to do with your brain—it’s just an optical issue of light transmission. This also means that we may not need to invoke an illusory process in the brain at all, and that we could potentially identify the nature of the dress through a photographic analysis.
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Source material from Scientific American
