Disagreeing about Crocs and socks: Creating profoundly ambiguous color displays

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.