Disagreeing about Crocs and socks: Creating profoundly ambiguous color displays

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method to create profoundly ambiguous color stimuli, exemplified by 'crocs and socks', revealing how prior experience influences color perception and disagreement.

Contribution

It presents a novel design principle for generating ambiguous color stimuli and demonstrates its application with the 'crocs and socks' set, linking perception to prior experience.

Findings

Stimuli are categorically ambiguous in color perception.

Perception can be predicted by fabric priors from experience.

Differential priors may explain polarized color disagreements.

Abstract

There is an increasing interest in the systematic disagreement about profoundly ambiguous stimuli in the color domain. However, this research has been hobbled by the fact that we could not create such stimuli at will. Here, we describe a design principle that allows the creation of such stimuli and apply this principle to create one such stimulus set - the crocs and socks. Using this set, we probed the color perception of a large sample of observers, showing that these stimuli are indeed categorically ambiguous and that we can predict the percept from fabric priors resulting from experience. We also relate the perception of these crocs to other color-ambiguous stimuli - the dress and the sneaker and conclude that differential priors likely underlie polarized disagreement in cognition more generally.