Quote:
Originally Posted by robotparker
Don't mind if I do!
I approached the problem with the mind of a photographer. I got my BFA in Photography and Media Arts and have worked as a freelance photographer for almost a decade, in addition to teaching photography on occasion so I'm no stranger to looking at bad images. When I first saw the original viral image, I immediately pegged it as a poorly exposed, mis-white-balanced image of a white and gold dress. And despite all the explanations I've seen to the contrary (including yours), I've never been able to see it otherwise.
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I should also say: your immense familiarity with over exposed images suggests you have very strong priors for a certain kind of interpretation. Need to think about if it actually predicts you'd see white gold. But this is interesting. Another data point we collected was we asked people if they had professional or hobby-level experience in the visual arts. We had specific category flags including photography. Because we wanted to know if that kind of experience predicts which camp you will fall into. We have yet to look at that data, but the intuition was that it could be telling.
I see now that you said my illusion doesn't work for you. We did find in our data that WG viewers tend to be stickier in their percept. They are significantly less likely to flip their percept with my illusion. But the vast majority still do switch.
Ahhhh this is too much fun but I really should get back to work. I put a different project on hold for the last two weeks while we hunkered down on this dress stuff and now that the prelim paper is submitted I need to switch gears back to the other project. Once that's done I'll come back to the dress stuff to work in a paper that tries to understand where the individual difference come from. At this point the holy grail is figuring out how to predict who will be WG and who will be BB. This will probably involve some hardcore Bayesian modeling. Thanks for going down this rabbit hole with me!