Ask Lemmy

These guys apparently reproduced the effect.

One apparently either sees white socks and pink crocs, or green socks and gray crocs.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-life-of-the-mind/202502/the-dress-10-years-on

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/b41aa1cd-3d1b-4ef8-886f-2c6494141805.jpeg

If it is true that the differential interpretation of the light source causes the disagreement about the percept, we should be able to recreate the effect de-novo:

And we did: We put a pink croc under green light so it looks grey, then added white socks which — reflecting the green light appeared green. People who know that these socks are white used the green tint as a cue that something is off with the light and mentally color-corrected the image. To them, the croc looked pink, even though the pixels are objectively grey. People who took the color of the socks — green — at face value, saw the croc — consistent with its pixel values – as grey.

EDIT: For me, it's green socks and gray crocs.

So this is really strange. I followed the link in the post above to look at the dress again and, as always, it's obviously blue and black, but I kind of stared at the white background of the wiki page, and just barely kept the top left corner of the dress in my vision. I shit you not, the dress slowly turned more white and I looked down at the rest of the dress and the stripes were gold! At first it was subtle but it gradually became blatantly white and gold.

Then I looked away, and it was black and blue again.

Weird.