ABSTRACT
Although studies on perception have always been an important area of research in psychology, its research prominence and focus have changed as a function of the history of psychology. The founders of our science were heavily involved in perception research, partly due to the heated debate concerning the necessity of distinguishing sensory and perceptual experiences. While some scholars (particularly Helmholtz 1867/1962) claimed that our perceptual experience is built or constructed from our sensations, others claimed that the distinction between sensation and perception is an artificial one and that we can only reach our sensory feelings through a process of abstraction. The debate emerged in all fields of perception but it was particularly evident when trying to explain visual depth perception. While Hering (1878/1964) advocated a direct fusion of the images from the two eyes into a single image which he calls the Cyclopean eye, Helmholtz defended the position that the two images are separately processed, and much later in the processing, there is a merging through higher-order ‘unconscious inferences’.
