Deborah Briihl wrote: > This is the classic GilChrist study: > http://nwkpsych.rutgers.edu/~alan/Gilchrist_Science_1977.pdf > > It is a lightness and color constancy experiment > > In the experiment above, people looked through a peephole into > a set up which had 2 rooms. The front room was dark and the back > room was lit. A white card was placed in the dark room. If people > saw the white card in the dark room - they identified it as white > but if they perceived it being in the lit room even though it was > in the dark room, they saw it as grey.
Mike Palij wrote: > Alan Gilchrist was on the faculty at Stony Brook when I was a > graduate student there and I took a perception seminar with him. Miguel Roig wrote: > I also took a couple of courses from him while at Rutgers-Newark. > ...Gilchrist was also a member of my dissertation committee Many years ago, I "supervised" the notorious Alan Gilchrist in his first postdoc, at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ. (During that time he not only carried out further work on lightness perception, but also collaborated on research that was reported at ARVO as "Prism adaptation without prisms".) I wrote to Alan asking for his take on The Dress. I'll forward his response in the next posting. ------------------------------------ From: Charles S. Harris <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Date: Sat, Feb 28, 2015 at 7:10 AM Subject: The Dress So, Alan, has your phone been ringing off the hook, with people hoping for a scientific explanation of The Dress? I've received inquiries from a former AT&T colleague & his daughter, from MY daughter, and from my GRANDDAUGHTER! The Dress gets National coverage on MSNBC: http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/the-great-dress-controversy-of-2015-405749827773 Their guest expert did a pretty good job in the limited time available. And on XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1492/ And even a New Yorker cartoon: http://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/daily-cartoon/daily-cartoon-friday-february-27th-white-gold-blue-black-dress I tried to write an answer, but even without being familiar with developments since The Revolution of 1977, my draft was stretching on and on, with far too many complications and caveats to be comprehensible. Most of the proposed explanations I've seen online really have nothing to say about why different people see different colors, and why the colors sometimes shift for the same observer. My initial guess was that the stimuli may actually be different --different color/intensity on diff. websites and on diff. displays. But what about two people looking at the same display? Well, maybe their viewing angles differed. When I view my PC screen at a slant, the dress looks MUCH lighter (whiter and golder) than when I look at it perpendicularly. So even if two people are sitting side by side, their retinal images may differ. More likely though, it seems to me that something like different illumination inferences may be to blame. The New York Times' explanation is the best I've seen so far: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/02/28/science/white-or-blue-dress.html Please keep me posted on what you conclude. --Charlie Charles S. Harris webmaster, "The Nurture Assumption" website http://judithrichharris.info/ email: [email protected] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=42629 or send a blank email to leave-42629-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
