The role of one-shot learning in #TheDress

Abstract

#TheDress is remarkable in two aspects. First, there is a bimodal split of the population in the perception of the dress's colors (white/gold vs. black/blue). Second, whereas interobserver variance is high, intra-observer variance is low, i.e., the percept rarely switches in a given individual. There are two plausible routes of explanations: either one-shot learning during the first presentation of the image splits observers into two different, stable populations, or the differences are caused by stable traits of observers, such as different visual systems. Here, we hid large parts of the image by white occluders. The majority of naïve participants perceived the dress as black and blue. With black occluders, the majority of observers perceived the dress as white and gold. The percept did not change when we subsequently presented the full image, arguing for a crucial role of one-shot learning. Next, we investigated whether the first fixation determines the perceived color in naïve observers. We found no such effect. It remains thus a puzzling question where the source of variability in the different percepts comes from.

Stripping #The Dress: the importance of contextual information on inter-individual differences in colour perception

“…Accordingly, we used participants' reported colour perception to subsequently allocate them to Blue and Black (B&B) and White and Gold (W&G) viewers, and also to the repeatedly described group of Blue and Brown (B&Br) viewers. Indeed, in contrast to notions that the ambiguous Dress picture perception is bimodal (Chetverikov & Ivanchei, 2016;Drissi Daoudi, Doerig, Parkosadze, Kunchulia, & Herzog, 2017;Vemuri et al, 2016), the emergence of the B&Br viewer group supports independent reports of a continuous phenomenon (Aston & Hurlbert, 2017;Gegenfurtner et al, 2015;Witzel et al, 2017). It seems that the perceptions of the ambiguous Dress picture ranges from white to blue, and from gold to black.…”

“…The second type of stimulus, which we presented after the patches, was the strip. Two strips were vertically cut out from two ambiguous Dress locations (see Figure 1 middle and Figure S1), potentially recognizable as belonging to the ambiguous Dress picture by non-naïve viewers (similar stimuli used in Drissi Daoudi et al, 2017). The strips were not stretched.…”

“…In other words, a reduced section of the ambiguous Dress picture is enough for the illusion to emerge. Emergence (although weaker) of the Dress illusion in the strip condition (the background was occluded) demonstrated that the surrounding context is not the essential driving force for the Dress illusion to occur (Chetverikov & Ivanchei, 2016;Drissi Daoudi et al, 2017;Wallisch, 2017;Witzel et al, 2017). A priori, our study was not designed to explain how context affects colour perception of the ambiguous Dress image.…”

“…Even knowing that contextualization, contrast, and illumination are important for the illusion to occur, these factors are not yet able to explain why individuals differ so strongly in their subjective perception. While currently light source (Chetverikov & Ivanchei, 2016) and one-shot learning (Drissi Daoudi et al, 2017) are some suggestions, we are certain additional suggestions will be communicated in the years to come. Jonauskaite et al (in press) 30 -30 -…”

#TheDress: Categorical perception of an ambiguous color image

“…Popular accounts suggest that people are fixed by “one-shot learning” in the way they see the dress image (Drissi Daoudi, Doerig, Parkosadze, Kunchulia, & Herzog, 2017 ). These observations have been taken to imply that the dress is not like a typical multistable image, because it is widely thought that most people experience frequent perceptual reversals of multistable images.…”