... the basis of a limited amount of evidence or data and made without awareness" (Reber and Reber, 2001) and were first articulated by Hermann Von Helmholtz (1867), who considered them to be a result of associations and experience. Through these ideas he pioneered the constructivist approach of perception which considered information from the senses to be insufficient in forming perceptual experience which, according to Helmholtz, required various cognitive processes. Unconscious inferences were thought to be the main processes involved in perception, adding meaning to the sensory input by unconsciously combining the information from the stimulus with other information to derive the perceived event. These inferences were described as being unconscious because we are not usually aware of this process and we cannot change our perceptions at will. This introduced the idea that perception was not a passive process but required intelligent problem solving based on knowledge. Although Helmholtz did not ...

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