Does Color Preference Influence Its Perception? A Pilot Study

According to modern neurobiological models of consciousness, Gestalt psychotherapy theory views perceptual experience as a phenomenon emerging from the interaction between interceptive and proprioceptive processes on the one hand and exteroceptive information on the other.This interaction, from a neurobiological perspective, can be imagined as occurring within the integrative activity of the thalamus, where information from both the body and the sensory organs converge in its nucleus, known as the Zona Incerta.The integrative process finally generates the perceptual gestalt, a preverbal experience of being in the world. In this sense, body states become part of the perceptual experience itself by determining the salient elements of an image.The perception and preference of colors seem to be a direct expression of this process of body-senses integration, which determines the basic qualities of color experience (brightness and color saturation) and the pleasant or unpleasant emotionality connected with color itself.The ambiguous image of a dress, which went viral in 2015, provides an additional tool to investigate color experience as some people see the dress as blue and black, others yellow and white.The present pilot study related the perception of the dress image to color preference using the Lüscher color test. Although it was a small sample of 100 subjects, a link emerged between preferred color and perceived color in the image. People who preferred blue or yellow saw the dress as blue or yellow, respectively, with a significantly high frequency. This finding needs to be further investigated by expanding the sample size and data collected. However, the survey evidence is strongly suggestive that color preference closely related to the body and emotions directly modifies perceptual experience.