The dress and individual differences in the perception of surface properties

Witzel, Christoph; Ο’Regan, J. Kevin; Hansmann-Roth, Sabrina

doi:10.1016/j.visres.2017.07.015

Cited by 34 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 59 publications

(184 reference statements)

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“…Nevertheless, most visual psychophysics is carried out with the tacit assumption that the appearance of suprathreshold stimuli is invariant across observers, or that any variations are small and can be ignored. This assumption is probably the reason why the large individual differences in the appearance of The Dress-a photograph that spread on the Internet in 2015-impressed not only naive observers but psychophysicists as well (Witzel, O'Regan, & Hansmann-Roth, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multidimensional internal dynamics underlying the perception of motion

Wexler

2018

Journal of Vision

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When ambiguous visual stimuli are presented continuously, they often lead to oscillations between usually two perceptions. Because of these oscillations, it has been thought that the underlying neural dynamics also arises from a binary or two-state system. Contradicting the binary assumption, it has been shown recently that the perception of some ambiguous stimuli is governed by continuously varying internal states, measured as biases that differ considerably from one observer to the next and that can also evolve over time (Wexler, Duyck, & Mamassian, 2015). Here I study bias patterns in the motion quartet, an ambiguous apparent motion stimulus, as the quartet's orientation is varied. The bias patterns are robustly idiosyncratic, and are even more complex than those that have been described previously. There are two qualitatively different bias types: Some observers prefer a translation axis, while others show preference for a rotation direction. Each type also varies parametrically: the orientation of the preferred axis, and the direction of preferred rotation. There are also clear cases of combination of the two bias types. When measured repeatedly over 9 hr, the bias patterns usually remain stable, but also sometimes evolve both parametrically (e.g., change of preferred axis), as well as across bias type (change from axial to rotational bias). Control experiments revealed that the variety of bias patterns observed across subjects, and their changes over time, are not due to voluntary decisions. Overall, these results exhibit the multidimensional complexity of internal states underlying the perception of even simple stimuli.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multidimensional internal dynamics underlying the perception of motion

Wexler

2018

Journal of Vision

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“…Nevertheless, most visual psychophysics is carried out with the tacit assumption that the appearance of suprathreshold stimuli is invariant across observers, or that any variations are small and can be ignored. This assumption is probably the reason why the large individual differences in the appearance of The Dress-a photograph that spread on the internet in 2015-impressed not only naïve observers but psychophysicists as well (Witzel et al, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multidimensional internal dynamics underlying the perception of motion

Wexler¹

2018

Preprint

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When ambiguous visual stimuli are presented continuously, they often lead to oscillations between usually two perceptions. Because of these oscillations, it has been thought that the underlying neural dynamics also arises from a binary or two-state system. Contradicting the binary assumption, it has been shown recently that the perception of some ambiguous stimuli is governed by continuously varying internal states, measured as biases that differ considerably from one observer to the next and that can also evolve over time (Wexler et al., 2015). Here I study bias patterns in the motion quartet, an ambiguous apparent motion stimulus, as the quartet's orientation is varied. The bias patterns are robustly idiosyncratic, and are even more complex than those that have been described previously. There are two qualitatively different bias types: some observers prefer a translation axis, while others show preference for a rotation direction. Each type also varies parametrically: the orientation of the preferred axis, and the direction of preferred rotation. The are also clear cases of combination of the two bias types. When measured repeatedly over 9 hours, the bias patterns usually remain stable, but also sometimes evolve both parametrically (e.g., change of preferred axis), as well as across bias type (change from axial to rotational bias). Control experiments revealed that the variety of bias patterns observed across subjects, and their changes over time, are not due to voluntary decisions. Overall, these results exhibit the multidimensional complexity of internal states underlying the perception of even simple stimuli.

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“…Subjects 220 subjects were recruited online from Amazon Mechanical-Turk and were monetarily reimbursed. (For discussion of this subject pool's reliability, see Crump et al, 2013; for other investigations of color perception run online, see Haberman, Brady, & Alvarez, 2015;Lafer-Sousa, Hermann, & Conway, 2015;Witzel, 2016;Witzel et al, 2017). This sample size followed Witzel (2016, Study 2), which ran 210 subjects; we slightly increased this number (both in this study and in Experiment 2) because of an "attention check" we added that we expected would lead to slightly more exclusions than in previous work.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 96%

Finding the “odd one out”: Memory color effects and the logic of appearance

Valenti

Firestone

2019

Cognition

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Can what we know change what we see? A line of research stretching back nearly a century suggests that knowing an object's canonical color can alter its visual appearance, such that objectively gray bananas appear to be tinged with yellow, and objectively orange hearts appear redder than they really are. Such "memory color" effects have constituted the strongest and most complete evidence that basic sensory processing can be penetrated by higher-level knowledge, and have contributed to theories of object perception in psychology, neuroscience, and even philosophy. Are such phenomena truly perceptual? Or could they instead reflect shifts in judgments and responses without altering online color perception? Here, we take a novel approach to this question by exploiting a "logic" that is inherent in visual processing but that higher-level cognition often cannot follow. In four experiments spanning both classical and contemporary work, we exhaust the predictions of memory color theories by exploring scenarios where memory color accounts make tortuous hypotheses that would be difficult for subjects to grasp, but that should be easily accommodated by visual processing. We show that such conditions eliminate or even reverse memory color effects in ways unaccounted-for by their underlying theories-especially in a novel "odd one out" paradigm that may help distinguish visual appearance from higher-level judgment in a powerful and general way. We suggest that prior knowledge can influence color judgments in real and robust ways, but that such influences may not truly reflect changes in visual appearance per se. We further discuss the general utility of this approach for isolating perception from judgment, both for memory color effects and beyond.

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The dress and individual differences in the perception of surface properties

Abstract: Graphical abstract

Cited by 34 publications

References 59 publications

Multidimensional internal dynamics underlying the perception of motion

Multidimensional internal dynamics underlying the perception of motion

Multidimensional internal dynamics underlying the perception of motion

Finding the “odd one out”: Memory color effects and the logic of appearance

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