Christoph Witzel
Vision scientist whose work established both what the dress does reveal and what it does not.
Who they are
Witzel reanalysed the earlier dress experiments and then ran two online surveys measuring perception of several ambiguous images alongside colour constancy, gloss perception, the subjective grey point and colour naming.
He is also co-author of the standard recent review of colour perception, constancy and categories.
Key papers
Witzel, C., O'Regan, J. K., & Hansmann-Roth, S. (2017). The dress and individual differences in the perception of surface properties. Vision Research, 141, 76-94.
Witzel, C., & Gegenfurtner, K. R. (2018). Color perception: objects, constancy, and categories. Annual Review of Vision Science, 4, 475-499.
Key ideas
How a person sees the dress is strongly related to their individual colour constancy, and comes down to implicit assumptions about the illumination.
Individual differences in the other ambiguous phenomena tested were independent of the dress and of each other, which undermines the idea of a general perceptual strategy.
There is one specific computation in which people differ, and no evidence that it predicts anything else about how they see.
Concepts on this site
Sources
- doi:10.1016/j.visres.2017.07.015
- doi:10.1146/annurev-vision-091517-034231