There is not a single red pixel in this picture, but yet the strawberries appear red
It’s the optical illusion blowing the Internet’s mind. The bizarre picture seems straightforward enough at first glance. A strawberry tart with the worst Instagram filter ever. So, if someone asked you what colour the strawberries were, the obvious answer might be red. They are strawberries. Strawberries are red. And even in this dreadful blue-grey tinted picture, they still appear to be red. Except, despite everything your mind is telling you, the strawberries in the picture are not red in colour. Confused? Don’t be.
In this picture, the strawberries are made up of grey and green pixels. Seriously. There's not a single red pixel in it.
The picture was tweeted out by Professor
Akiyoshi Kitaoka, who teaches psychology at Ritsumeikan University in Japan. Turns out, Professor Kitaoka studies
visual illusions.
Having flashbacks to "
The Dress?" You know, that unbelievably viral picture that divided the Internet in 2015. Blue and black or white and gold – everyone had an opinion.
The phenomenon of
colour constancy is common to both pictures. As Bevil Conway, an expert on visual perception, explains to
Motherboard, over time, our brains have evolved to "colour correct" so the colours we see look the same no matter the lighting. Otherwise, objects would appear to be different colours outdoors under a clear, blue sky versus indoors in fluorescent or incandescent light. And that would lead to a lot of confusion.
So, even though the picture tweeted only includes grey and green pixels and zero red ones, we still see red strawberries.
The illusion is also helped by the fact that we recognise the objects in the picture as strawberries, which we typically associate with the colour red.
There you have it, science is cool!