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by theoh 2777 days ago
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.

1 comments

> 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