Task-dependent extraction of information from videos of iridescent and glossy samples

We present an exploratory study on iridescence that revealed systematic differences in the perceptual clustering of glossy and iridescent samples that was driven by instructions to focus on either the material or the color properties of the samples. Participants' similarity ratings of pairs of video stimuli, showing the samples from multiple views, were analyzed using multidimensional scaling (MDS), and differences between the MDS solutions for the two tasks were consistent with flexible weighting of information from different views of the samples. These findings point to ecological implications for how viewers perceive and interact with the color-changing properties of iridescent objects.