Bevil Conway
Neuroscientist and senior author of the first systematic study of the dress photograph.
Who they are
Conway works on colour and vision. When the dress divided the internet in 2015, his group treated it as an experiment rather than as a curiosity, and produced the account the field has argued about since.
The paper's decisive move is not the survey. It is the demonstration that the percept can be flipped.
Key papers
Lafer-Sousa, R., Hermann, K. L., & Conway, B. R. (2015). Striking individual differences in color perception uncovered by the dress photograph. Current Biology, 25(13), R545-R546.
Key ideas
Observers resolve the image into one of three stable percepts, shown with a language-independent colour-gamut task rather than with words.
The proposed explanation is that people differ in the illuminant they assume: a cool light yields white and gold, a warm light yields blue and black, a neutral assumption yields blue and brown, which is what the pixels measure as.
Introducing overt cues to the illumination flips which colours a person sees.
Concepts on this site
Sources
- doi:10.1016/j.cub.2015.04.053