Three Perspectives on “The Dress”

When you look at this photograph, what colors are the dress? Some see blue and black stripes, others see white and gold stripes. This striking variation took the internet by storm in February; now Current Biology on May 14 is publishing three short papers on why the image is seen differently by different observers, and what this tells us about the complicated workings of color perception.

Individual differences in color perception uncovered by “The Dress”

For neuroscientists like Bevil Conway, “The Dress” phenomenon marked the greatest extent of individual differences in color perception ever documented. It’s long been known that certain optical illusions can cause us to see two different shapes in the same image (e.g., a face or a vase), but what makes “The Dress” photograph so mind-blowing is that it’s the first time a single image could be seen by different people as wholly different colors.

“It caught fire because it was a case in which color wasn’t doing what we expect,” says Conway, who teaches at Wellesley College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, the #whiteandgold versus #blackandblue debate on social media wasn’t scientific proof as to how different we each perceived “The Dress.” To find out, Conway and his team designed an experiment in which they asked people to identify the colors they saw on “The Dress” from a full palette.

In a survey of 1,400 individuals, with over 300 who had never seen “The Dress” before, Conway and his team found impressive individual differences in color perception; they also found, surprisingly, that people fall into one of three camps corresponding to the main groups identified by social media: a blue/black camp, a white/gold camp, and a smaller blue/brown contingent.

“It could have been the case that you had a continuum of perceived colors, but if you plot the colors people picked, you see two main clumps falling into the two categories for what words people used to describe the colors of ‘The Dress,'” says Conway. “This shows that the perception of the dress is variously stable. By studying the pair of colors in ‘The Dress,’ we can answer the age-old question: do you see colors the way that I see them? And the answer is sometimes ‘no.'”

Another finding from the survey was that perception differed by age and sex. Older people and women were more likely to report seeing “The Dress” as white and gold, while younger people were more likely to say that it was black and blue.

Conway believes that these differences in perception may correspond to the type of light that individuals’ brains expect to be in their environment. For example, people who perceive “The Dress” as white and gold may have just been exposed to natural daylight, while those who saw a black and blue garment may spend most of their time surrounded by artificial light sources. The brains of those who saw a brown and blue dress are likely used to something in between.

“The big open question is what causes these differences in the population,” Conway says. “One framework for understanding why you get these variations is to consider how light is contaminated by outside illumination, such as a blue sky or incandescent light. Your visual system has to decide whether it gets rid of shorter, bluer wavelengths of light or the longer, redder wavelengths, and that decision may change how you see ‘The Dress.'”

The many colors of “The Dress”

In the days after “The Dress” was posted online, a group led by psychologist Karl Gegenfurtner at Giessen University in Germany asked 15 people to view the photograph on a well-calibrated color screen under controlled lighting. The participants then had to adjust the color of a disc to correspond to the colors they saw in the photograph. For the lighter stripe, participants reported seeing a continuous range of shades from light blue to dark blue, rather than white and blue, the two dominant colors reported so far.

“The question should thus not be whether the dress is blue or white, but whether it is light blue or dark blue,” write Gegenfurtner and his co-authors. “Despite the continuous choice of matching colors, observers are consistent in calling the dress ‘white’ when their match lies above a certain brightness and ‘blue’ when it lies below.”

Gegenfurtner’s team also found that all of the colors observed in “The Dress” correspond very closely to those found in daylight, adding support to the theory that how the eye interprets natural sunlight is what triggered #Dressgate 2015.

The special ambiguity of blue

Would “The Dress” have gone viral had it been #greenandblack or #orangeandblack? Not likely, argues cognitive scientist Michael Webster at the University of Nevada, Reno. He believes that the photograph is part of a growing body of evidence showing that the human eye is more likely to confuse blue objects with blue lighting.

For example, if you stare at a gray object and make the gray increasingly yellow or blue, then you’re more likely to see the object as yellow than as blue. This difference likely comes from how the eye evolved in the presence of natural lighting from the sun and the sky.

To test this, Webster and his research team surveyed 87 college students on what color they found the light-blue stripes of “The Dress” to be. The participants were split about fifty-fifty between white and blue. The researchers then inverted the image of the dress so that the black stripes appeared blue and the blue stripes appeared gold. Of those surveyed, nearly 95% said that the stripes were yellow or gold.

“We discovered a novel property of color perception and constancy, involving how we experience shades of blue versus yellow,” write the authors. “We found that surfaces are much more likely to be perceived as white or gray when their color is varied along bluish directions, compared to equivalent variations along yellowish (or reddish or greenish) directions.”

So how we perceive colour can vary due to a range of factors. Not exactly news but there it is.

Isn’t this the sort of stuff patents should apply to?

A fascinating decision by the Federal Court of Australia this week, that will have some significant implications for research in coming years.

The full bench of the Federal Court of Australia has ruled that private companies do have the right to control human genes. The court upheld a decision from February 2013 that ruled patents on breast cancer genes were valid, because the method of isolating the gene created something new and could therefore be patented.

The reaction has been fairly swift from both the legal and scientific sectors.

Dr Luigi Palombi, a patent lawyer and Adjunct Professor in the School of Law at Murdoch University: “The decision ignores the bedrock principle of 400 years of patent law. Only an invention can be the subject of a patent. The decision ignores the scientific facts. It ignores good policy. And it ignores common sense. Australian ingenuity in the biological sciences is now handcuffed by this decision.”

Dr Palombi also questioned the inconsistencies at an international level:

“How is it possible that the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously came to the exact opposite result in only three months? Despite the attempt by the Full Federal Court to try and differentiate the precise claims between the Australian and U.S. patents that Myriad has over the BRCA 1 genetic mutations, the so-called invention is the same.”

This inconsistency has ramifications for local researchers as well :

“At the end of the day, the Australian patent claims pieces of genetic material (BRCA 1 gene mutations) extracted from the human body are an ‘inventionâ€. How is that something anyone invented? American scientists, universities and companies now have the freedom to ignore patents over isolated biological materials that are not ‘markedly different to any found in natureâ€, but Australian scientists, universities and companies cannot. This decision reinforces the need for the Australian parliament to change patent law in Australia.”

Paul Grogan, Director of Advocacy at Cancer Council Australia, sees legislative change as being required:

“Given the unanimous Federal Court ruling is an interpretation of Australian law, the law itself needs to change to protect healthcare consumers from gene monopolies … The patents system should reward innovation and help deliver affordable healthcare, not stymie research and increase costs by allowing commercial entities to control the use of human genetic materials.”

I find it hard to disagree with either men – what’s your take?

[Release originally via Australian Science Media Centre]

I give it ten years before we’re all riding around in nitrogen fuelled land-speeders. You heard it here first.

One such example on the cool side of the equation is this ball that contains 36 cameras. Have a look for yourself:

So imagine: in five years time, most of us will be ‘printing’ out products, possibly as advanced as these (though that may take a little longer). Do you believe it or not?

[via Extreme Tech]

Have a more detailed look for yourself.

Where’s Miami Vice when you need them?

via [Cosmos]

Entities like Berkeley Bionics are working flat out to develop options that assist walking, and currently it doesn’t get much better than their eLegs, which allow, with practice, the ability to walk without being reliant on a wheelchair or someone else.

Have a look:

Like any new tech, it’s cost is likely to be out of the reach of most people who need it. Here’s hoping it’s not too long before it’s a common option for everyone who wants it.

via [Dave Everhart]

The results are amazing – and it was educational to boot for all involved. It’s obviously not a low-budget home project but it’s certainly one that delivered some great results. It sort of beats playing Wii Sports as a family!

Have a look:

via [Dave Everhart]

Photo courtesy http://texting-while-driving.org/

A study by the University of North Texas Health Center has shown what may be unsurprising to a lot of people: texting while driving has killed a lot of people.

The study looked at United States drivers between 1999 and 2008, and amongst other things found:

• After declining from 1999 to 2005, fatalities from distracted driving increased 28% after 2005, rising from 4572 fatalities to 5870 in 2008
• Crashes increasingly involved male drivers driving alone in collisions with roadside obstructions in urban areas.
• Increasing texting volumes resulted in more than 16000 additional road fatalities from 2001 to 2007.

Of course, the challenge will be somehow convincing the huge number of driving texters out there that they in fact aren’t better drivers than the sixteen thousand people who have died already. There are already sites devoted to the issue, such as this one.

It’d be interesting to know what the gender breakdown of the fatalities were i.e. are males the primary offenders like they are with accidents more widely? Or is it something that females dominate?

Would love to get your thoughts / close call stories.

via [LA Times]

The purpose of the iCub project is:

to study cognition through the implementation of a humanoid robot the size of a 3.5 year old child: the iCub. This is an open project in many different ways: we distribute the platform openly, we develop software open-source, and we are open to including new partners and form collaboration worldwide.

Said iCub nailed a bulls-eye on its eighth attempt at Archery. How long can it be before it has a death ray and an attitude to match?

via [Technabob]

Press release hype aside, this seems a pretty well fleshed-out alarm / sleep cycle analyser with some psychology-based options as well. One of those psychology sessions is a tongue-in-cheek piece on iPhone addiction -more on the app in the short review below. Back on the press release, some of its claims seemed a little overblown from a science  viewpoint, so I contacted Brett Galbraith to get some more information, which he promptly provided:

CT: You make the claim “A simulated sunrise means that the phone lights up a few minutes before the alarm to naturally increase your cortisol levels and wake you up naturally”. Can you explain how this occurs? My understanding of the research is that waking up in light does increase the cortisol response, but do you believe the level of illumination from the iPhone and its type of light allows that to occur? If so – do you have data to support it?

BG: Any type of light will begin to wake a person after they have been asleep. That of course is a big part of the reason why we awake as the sun comes up and why we find it so hard to get up in a dark room. The white screen (torch) of the iPhone is incredibly bright when in a dark room and is definitely noticeable. I only have circumstantial evidence that it works with an iPhone but it is fairly strong as scientifically it only takes quite a small amount of light to begin the chemical reaction ie the cortisol response, that triggers the natural waking process.

CT: Cortisol levels are higher for people under stress e.g. people of lower socio-economic status experience higher cortisol levels – so the quality of sleep and the quality of waking isn’t necessarily related to cortisol levels. Would you agree?

BG: Yes and no – people get used to or adapt to all sorts of different stimuli such as the sound of a train, snoring, a fan in the room (white noise) etc etc. If there is additional stimuli, i.e. more light, then this will assist the natural process of waking up. In saying this, the “Sunrise Simulator” is not the main method of allowing someone to awake refreshed, it is a mixture of using sleep science data as to sleep patterns in “normal” populations mixed with movement data we get from the iPhone’s accelerometer, to predict as accurately as possible, the optimum time to wake someone up. In future additions we will also change the “settings” based on other data around age, gender and potentially socio economic status – wouldn’t that be controversial!

CT: Are you able to elaborate on the iPsychologist feature. Specifically: which psychologist/s were involved, which approach is taken (I’m assuming CBT) and are you able to share any data on its efficacy?

BG: We used a local Psychologist who is also a University lecturer. They provided advice as to a number of different strategies and theories that could be used. As developers, the challenge for us was to develop a system that was able to be used and was useful, to a large range of users. Obviously some techniques would be better for different “conditions” so we had to go for one that was broadly helpful to all. Obviously self talk or autosuggestion has been around for 100’s of years. The Coue Method features heavily in our methodology. Basically it assumes the person is on the way to full health, they are getting better every day and that soon they will be much better and that there is light at the end of the tunnel. “Day by day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.” We didn’t try to reconstruct our own research as the Net and medical journals are full of information backing the assumptions of the system we use and that was suggested by our Psychologist. It is also a “popular” method that users hear about every day as they watch a show like Oprah and Dr Phil.

CT: You make the claim that “The biggest problem Doctors face is determining the accuracy of their patients self assessment when it comes to their sleeping patterns and then determining the best course of action based on fairly unreliable data. Now their patients can use our system and the Doctors will be able to determine vastly more accurate sleep and awake times with advanced statistics including; REM sleep, sleep stages 1 to 4 and even how long and how often users awoke during the night. This is obviously pretty powerful and will lead to vastly improved advice and outcomes”.

I was just wondering how you felt the app would fit into a diagnostic regime i.e. if sleep disturbances have got to the stage of seeking medical advice, the current approach would be formalised diagnostics such as sleep studies. How do you see the app fitting into that equation?

Angry Birds addiction you need to beat?

BG: We spoke to a number of Doctors about the App without doing it to get information but just because they were friends and we were excited about the App. It came as quite a surprise that they were actually quite excited about how the App could assist them in their day to day jobs. If you ask anyone who grumbles about their sleep how much they have, chances are that they will exaggerate their real circumstances often subliminally and without any real or measurable or recorded data.

At a bare minimum, SSA provides the time they went to bed and the time they got up. This data alone is very useful for Doctors. The amount of times they use the torch is also helpful mixed with the awake or “considerable movement” setting to determine awake time as it shows how often they are getting up during the night. This has a large impact on REM sleep in particular and can mean that people are never reaching the REM phase and this can cause a number of additional issues not easily recognisable by a doctor. The other issue is the expense of diagnostic studies that measure brain wave activity and how unnatural it is to sleep when you are in an unusual place with wires attached to your body.

SSA is just another tool for Doctors and patients and in the future we hope to include some more powerful reporting options to assist users and Doctors further. At the end of the day, any strategy that can be used to educate people about sleeping issues and to provide better data to Doctors is a very good thing.

Having used the app for only a few hours, my impression so far is that this is a very polished piece of code. It looks good, it’s intuitive and it has a real depth of features.  Whether it’ll improve your sleep or mental state is up to you. Like anything, if you maintain the discipline the approach requires, you may see some good results. I’ll certainly be trying it out over coming weeks and will give more impressions then. Kudos to Brett Galbraith as well for his detailed responses on the science behind the app.

Review score: 8/10

Cost: US$4.99 / AU $5.99

Get it here