[vacri]

You're just wrong on this one. Humans can recognise a lot of things that aren't in the form that they're used to. It's seen a lot of research in psychology.

As for advantages over neural nets, one of the primary ones is that humans can recognise things from unusual angles much more easily. When I tried QuickDraw and doodled things from non-stereotyped angles (like a three-quarter view of a car rather than the usual 2D side view), it had no idea.

The dalmation optical illusion[1] is another example of human ability to pick out patterns and assign them to belong to certain objects. Neural nets have different abilities, and are sometimes better at picking out different sorts of patterns than humans.

[1] http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/05/Pe...