What color is this

dress?

By @PsychReview, a high school AP Psychology
teacher and photographer

A lot of my students have been asking for my point of view of the dress color saga. So, here it is! Im going to try to
use a lot of terms that they should be familiar with (AP Exam reviewyay!).

Terms to remember:
Sensation: Bottom-up processingWhat your sensory receptors actually see, hear, smell, feel, etc.
Transduction: Converting the physical stimulus into an electrochemical one the brain can interpret.
Perception: Top-down processingwhat your brain actually interprets from the sensory data it receives.

Your eyes have two types of photoreceptors in your retinas, called rods and cones. Rods process lights and darks
and cones process colors. Your brain has specialized cells in the visual cortex of your occipital lobes, called feature
detectors. These help interpret shades, angles, shadows, etc. Color, or hue, is based on our brains interpretation
of the wavelengths of light. All of these and more are working together to help you figure out what colors you see.

Both rods and cones send signals through bipolar cells and then the ganglion cells. The axons of the ganglion cells
make up your optic nerve that goes to your brain for processing. However, your brain is what ultimately makes the
decision. You can alter your perception of the dress with a simple trick.

Look at bright light first. You probably see the blue dress.
Look at something dark first, or close your eyes and cover them for a minute before looking at the dress. You
probably see the white dress now. Why?

Your brain processes the image as being overexposed or underexposed, based on the sensory input it has received.
Originally you see from your rods and cones, right? But there is so much more really happening here. Your brain
has to decide how much light it thinks was reflecting off the dress. It does this based a lot on previous experiences
you have had. These act as context cues for future similar experiences.

Is the dress in bright light? Or is it in shadow? You probably werent consciously thinking about that, but this
affects how you see the dress. You dont really think the color of the dress changes, but the light affects how you see
it. Its a perceptual principle called brightness constancy. If the dress was overexposed (in bright light) it is less
reflectiveblue and black. If the dress was underexposed to light (in shadow), your brain thinks it is more
reflectivewhite and gold. The apparent brightness, or intensity, of this light is called luminance.

Now, what all my students really to know is this Whats the RIGHT answer? What color is it, REALLY? Here is
where my photography experience helps, haha.

I took several samples of the colors in Photoshop. On the blue versus white part, they were all clearly shades of
blue, some with a slight purple hue to them. On the gold versus black part, they were all almost black, but some
had a slight orange hue to them (which helps explain the brain interpreting gold there).

So, I would say the original dress is blue and black.


Its a lot like a simple experiment I did with my class.
There are several different versions of this, but heres
the one from the really cool TV show, Brain Games.
The two gray boxes are the exact same shade of gray,
but your brain has a hard time with this, because it
thinks there are shadows. Put your finger through
the white part in the middle if you are having a hard
time seeing that they are the same:

Heres another version, where A and B are exactly the
same shade of gray, but your brain interprets them
differently, perceiving the apparent shadow:

Thats all I have got to say about the subject other than thisCan we all just agree that the dress is ugly?

Follow @PsychReview on Twitter for more review for the AP Exam!