Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

My daughter is doing the chromatic adaptation project (now you see it, now you don't). She is in resource and is in 7th grade. This is her first "real" science experiment and she chose her own experiment. Thank you Science Buddies! The main issue we face right now is not being able to get the image resolution high enough to have prints made. We want to use the one of the airplane landing on the lake with the forest background and with the fixation points. We are struggling to do this experiment in every way imaginable and it is far too advanced for my daughter. I don't want to do her project for her or think for her and my questions are not intended to circumvent the process, etc... I was impressed that she spent so much time (very difficult for her) looking at Science Buddies to find an experiment she found interesting. We are too late in the game to change projects now and we must forge ahead with this one. Can someone please tell me where to find a high resolution image of the airplane with the forest background? It would also be great if there was one other photo similar in design so that she can collect data on more than the one photo. We are hoping to find two images that can be printed onto 8x10 photo paper. I/we are also struggling to know how to simplify this experiment. One of the things that she has to answer is how this type of experiment contributes to the field of study. I have no clue how to answer that. Is there a "hotline" or something that is available to call and get help? Obviously not for free and I am aware that everyone's time is valuable. Any help would be appreciated very much. Thank you.

Hi and welcome to Scibuddies. That’s a really cool project! I just saw something very similar to that on the National Geographic channel show, Brain Games, this evening. It really is amazing how your brain can fool you into thinking colors have changed when they really haven’t.
I read the Scibuddies project that you are doing and opened the full-size image from the link https://www.sciencebuddies.org/Files/21 ... img004.jpg

Was this the image that you tried to print from? What was wrong? I didn't try printing it, but it looks like the resolution would be good enough to use as is at a printed size of 8" x 10". I don't see that you really need to print the picture, though. Can't you just look at it on a computer monitor the way you did in the project guide?

I did a search in Google images using the term "chromatic adaptation" and found another picture similar to the one in Scibuddies and there are many others that you can check out--maybe some with higher resolution. There may also be a different kind of chromatic adaptation experiment that you can try. The one on Brain games had one image showing colored areas that you looked at for 20 seconds then switched to a corresponding black and white image of a beach scene. People saw color in the B&W image even thought there was no color there. Here's the link to the show if you want to see if you can find the Feb. 26 episode: http://braingames.nationalgeographic.com/episode/8/. It is extremely interesting and relevant to these experiments.

As for your last question about what research like this contributes, I guess you could just say it increases our basic understanding of how the brain works. Maybe the information we gather by doing experiments about color changes like this could be used to create traffic warning signs or markings that are more visible or attention-getting. Advertisers are also intensely interested in how we perceive things and I'm sure they will be paying lots of attention to 'brain games' and how they can use the information to better get their messages to us.

I hope this helps with your project. One last thing i would suggest is that you both do the experiments so that you can compare the results for an adult with that of a child. That could be significant. If you can get more people to do the experiments that would also give you more results to compare.

Best wishes,

Sybee