[lisper]

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.

[theoh]

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.

[lisper]

> 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.

[1] http://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/ICP2016.html