As far as I can tell, Solitaire and colors and brains have a very weird relationship with each other. A zillion years ago in a former life, when I worked at an office, some customer of my office's decided that they wanted to train people to be more open minded about new ideas, and so they sent over a video that was supposed to do this. I don't think the video accomplished anything useful, but it did have one part that fascinated me. In the video, they flipped quickly through a deck of cards and asked if there was anything strange about them. Nobody in the room thought that there was. So then later they flipped through the deck more slowly, and again nobody picked up on anything wrong with the cards. Then they did it again really slowly, and still the cards looked okay. Finally the announcer pointed out that the red suits were printed in black and the black suits were printed in red. Once he said that, I could totally see it. Before he pointed it out, my brain just automatically "corrected" the cards to their proper colors. I remember being just barely conscious of thinking that the film that we were watching was a bad print where the colors looked weird, the first time I saw the cards, but then after that I really didn't notice anymore.

Anyway, that is very different from what you were saying about the solitaire cards in black and white. But what I find interesting is how our brains cue in on what card we are looking at. I figure we've all seen playing cards enough times that we don't need the full set of cues to mentally decide which card we are looking at. I find this intriguing -- I'd love for some psychologist to do studies on this so that I could read the reports. :)