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Key points
- What people see is consistently affected by context.
- Context can also influence how people interpret what they see.
- This phenomenon can apply to colors, object types, and other elements of perception.
Light comes in through your eyes, is processed by the brain, and allows you to perceive the world in painstaking detail. At least, that’s how it seems. If you look outside, you can notice subtle textures of tree bark, and gradations of color across the moss and grass that blanket the ground.
Although it’s true that our brains can construct a reality replete with details, it’s equally true that our brain regularly takes shortcuts and makes best guesses as to what is actually in the world around us. Most of the time, we are blissfully ignorant of these shortcuts and guesses. But other times, they create problems for how we, quite literally, see the world.
In February of 2015, a photograph of a dress became an internet sensation, because some individuals saw the dress as gold and white, while others saw it as blue and black. It all depended on how the brain interpreted the lighting in the photograph (Winkler, Spillmann, Werner, & Webster, 2015). If the brain understood it to be a washed-out image, then the colors were interpreted as blue and black (the actual color of the dress). But if the brain interpreted the photograph’s lighting in a different way, then those same wavelengths of light that hit the retina were interpreted by the brain to be white and gold.
It was a striking demonstration of an ever-present phenomenon, which is that what we see is affected by context, and by how we interpret that context. Here’s a simple example of the same type of phenomenon. What color is the bar in the center of this image?
Most likely, you see that center bar as having a gradient from light on one side to dark on the other. But in reality, the center bar is the same shade of gray all the way across; it is only the color of the background that changes.
The brain doesn’t rely on context just for determining the color of something. It also relies on context when determining the meaning of something. Read these symbols:
Easy, right? A B C.
Now, read these symbols:
Look again at the symbol that you first called “B” and then called “13.” They are visually identical. All that differed was the context in which you saw them presented; that context was powerful enough to change the way you interpreted the content.
This role of context can affect not only how we see symbols like letters and numbers, but how we interpret more complex, ambiguous objects. Is that a dog or a coyote in the field? Is that a stroller or a shopping cart being pushed across the parking lot? The answer you reach will likely depend on your understanding of the context.
References
Winkler, A. D., Spillmann, L., Werner, J. S., & Webster, M. A. (2015). Asymmetries in blue–yellow color perception and in the color of ‘the dress’. Current Biology, 25(13), R547-R548.
