ArticleCurrent biology : CB2015
Asymmetries in blue-yellow color perception and in the color of 'the dress'.
Article in Current biology : CB, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 40 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
40 citing papers in PubMed.
- Asymmetries in hue percepts and early cortical color coding: Evidence from chromatic visual evoked potentials.Journal of vision · 2026Article
- Asymmetries in hue measured behaviorally and with visual evoked potentials.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Achromatic loci in normal and anomalous trichromats.Journal of the Optical Society of America. A, Optics, image science, and vision · 2025Article
- Visual search for warm and cool colors.Journal of the Optical Society of America. A, Optics, image science, and vision · 2025Article
- Measurements of chromatic adaptation and luminous efficiency while wearing colored filters.Journal of vision · 2024Article
- Perception of #TheDress in childhood is influenced by age and green-leaf preference.Journal of vision · 2024Observational
- Color constancy in real-world settings.Journal of vision · 2024Article
- The neural origin for asymmetric coding of surface color in the primate visual cortex.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Priming of probabilistic attentional templates.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2023Review
- The dominating impacts of Helmholtz-Kohlrausch effect on color-induced glossiness enhancement.Journal of vision · 2023Article
- What colour are your eyes? Teaching the genetics of eye colour & colour vision. Edridge Green Lecture RCOphth Annual Congress Glasgow May 2019.Eye (London, England) · 2022Review
- Temporal dynamics of the neural representation of hue and luminance polarity.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Luminosity thresholds of colored surfaces are determined by their upper-limit luminances empirically internalized in the visual system.Journal of vision · 2021Article
- Individual Differences in Colour Perception: The Role of Low-Saturated and Complementary Colours in Ambiguous Images.i-Perception · 2021Article
- Color Space Geometry Uncovered with Magnetoencephalography.Current biology : CB · 2021Article
- Surface properties and the perception of color.Journal of vision · 2021Article
- Explaining #theShoe based on the optimal color hypothesis: The role of chromaticity vs. luminance distribution in an ambiguous image.Vision research · 2021Article
- Specular highlights improve color constancy when other cues are weakened.Journal of vision · 2020Article
- Article
- Stripping #The Dress: the importance of contextual information on inter-individual differences in colour perception.Psychological research · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The perception of color poses daunting challenges, because the light spectrum reaching the eye depends on both the reflectance of objects and the spectrum of the illuminating light source. Solving this problem requires sophisticated inferences about the properties of lighting and surfaces, and many striking examples of 'color constancy' illustrate how our vision compensates for variations in illumination to estimate the color of objects (for example [1-3]). We discovered a novel property of color perception and constancy, involving how we experience shades of blue versus yellow. We found that surfaces are much more likely to be perceived as white or gray when their color is varied along bluish directions, compared with equivalent variations along yellowish (or reddish or greenish) directions. This selective bias may reflect a tendency to attribute bluish tints to the illuminant rather than the object, consistent with an inference that indirect lighting from the sky and in shadows tends to be bluish. The blue-yellow asymmetry has striking effects on the appearance of images when their colors are reversed, turning white to yellow and silver to gold, and helps account for the variation among observers in the colors experienced in 'the dress' image that recently consumed the internet. Observers variously describe the dress as blue-black or white-gold, and this has been explained by whether the dress appears to be in direct lighting or shade (for example [5]). We show that these individual differences and potential lighting interpretations also depend on the special ambiguity of blue, for simply reversing the image colors causes almost all observers to report the lighter stripes as yellowish.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.