I think the GP didn't mean to imply that humans have an innate cat representation from birth.
It makes more sense to interpret the comment as saying that humans don't learn an internal image representation. Humans do learn representations of bridges, aircraft, cats, etc. But those are built on top of an image processing/representation system that we are born with, analogous to raster graphics?
Edit: Maybe I'm misreading the comment. What's definitely built in at birth is things like edge and orientation detectors. A zebra detector would be a surprise.
> I think the GP didn't mean to imply that humans have an innate cat representation from birth.
Actually, that is what I meant, though I don't have a reference for cat detectors per se. But there is ample evidence for innate feature detectors of comparable complexity (e.g. human facial expressions), even if the actual target is something other than cats.
I don't know about cats, but the ability of newborns to identify human faces is well documented. The details don't really matter. Whether it's cats or something else, we humans come with some very sophisticated feature-detectors hard-wired in.
There are obviously classes of objects that we don't have hard-wired detectors for. The face is one of the few that I've heard claimed as wired from birth.
But I think "feature detectors" are exactly what the earlier comment was referring to, e.g. a Gabor-wavelet-style decomposition of the retinal image. Deep learning systems have to learn those; we're born with them.
> Gabor-wavelet-style decomposition of the retinal image
Well, that's one theory. But I think it will turn out to be a lot more complex than that. One thing that I haven't seen anyone pay much attention to is feature detectors in the time domain, which we clearly have. We notice movement as a fundamental feature. Our movement detectors can actually be triggered by static images [1]. One of the ways we distinguish dogs from cats (I believe) is by the way they move. It would be a very interesting experiment to use CGI to make a dog move like a cat and vice versa and see how those are perceived.
It makes more sense to interpret the comment as saying that humans don't learn an internal image representation. Humans do learn representations of bridges, aircraft, cats, etc. But those are built on top of an image processing/representation system that we are born with, analogous to raster graphics?
Edit: Maybe I'm misreading the comment. What's definitely built in at birth is things like edge and orientation detectors. A zebra detector would be a surprise.