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nmackow's picture

Color Perception Study.

I questioned 16 Bryn Mawr students about the following two pictures:

 

For the first illusion, I asked whether the image appeared to be moving to the subjects. Only 25% of my subjects responded Yes. I think that because participants knew they were expected to be tricked by the illusion, they were determined not to be. I then asked what color the spirals in the picture appeared to be. It seemed that most people could only see that there was a yellow spiral, which makes me think that my question caused subjects to look too closely at the image. It is true that the main spirals are yellow, but at first glance the inner spiral should appear to be a cream or pinkish color. Here are the results of that question:

The next questions I asked pertained to the second image I have displayed. I asked subjects to read out the color of the word they were seeing and not the actual word. Because one part of the brain recognizes the word it is seeing and another part tries to identify the color presented, errors of perception can occur. This can cause people to read out the actual word instead of the color they are seeing. Here are my results:

I asked respondents if the reasoning for this perception error made sense. I wanted to know if people knew why it was hard to vocalize the color of a word when the word was a color before they took my test. As you can see, it appears that a majority of respondents knew this fact before taking the illusion test which may have skewed responses.

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