After cramming up Facebook and Twitter feeds Thursday night, the viral debate surrounding the color of a dress sparked conspiracy theories across the world.
Originally uploaded by Tumblr user swiked, the photo features a striped dress with a caption asking viewers to decide if the dress is white and gold or blue and black.
Tumblr user swiked added another photo to her blog, displaying the same dress photoed from a different angle and lighting, this time evident to viewers the dress was blue and black.
Social media users continued to dispute the color of the dress, creating three top-trending hashtags on Twitter. Some viewers commented on the Tumblr post that the dress changed colors each time they viewed it.
UW-Madison assistant professor of psychology and expert in neural processing of visual information Bas Rokers described how the visual illusion tricks viewers’ minds.
“In any kind of perception, often times you don’t have enough information to make the actual assessment,” Rokers said. “So often times, what the brain does is it makes particular assumptions about what’s going on.”
The perceived color of the dress is affected by the light viewers think is shining on it, especially when the background light is also bright, Rokers said.
“So what the brain has to do is disentangle it, it has to try and figure out which part of the light that’s hitting the eye was due to the lack of the illumination, and what comes from the reflection of the object.”
Rokers described various illustrations demonstrating the same effect, proving how the surrounding area of an object can morph viewers’ observations.
“So for this dress, you’re making an assumption,” Rokers said. “You’re basically trying to figure out, is this dress lit by skylight, as in blue light, or is it lit by sunlight, yellow light?”
Rokers said that while he was tricked and originally perceived the dress as white and gold, he agreed with various online reports which proposed the original manufactured dress is blue and black.
