And I meant doodles too
In: Biology
Ok so I don’t really have a proper explanation for this but this made me think of a pretty cool thought experiment. Take 3 things.
A kitchen knife, an ancient embroided knife, and a plastic toy knife.
Despite having completely different molecular compositions and structures and curves, etc. nearly everyone will describe the term ‘knife’ for all three when asked to describe them with one word. So, why did we assign them the same thing despite their physical and structural differences?
It’s most likely because we understand what the essence of a knife is, based on our social and life experience. So, maybe there is a pattern or essence to these poorly drawn drawings that we can recognize as only one thing.
It’s so that if we were to go partially blind temporarily or permanently we could still recognize us/them.
This is actually something that’s a hotspot of research, and since we haven’t been able to break down the human brain/mind entirely yet, I don’t think we have a definitive answer. However, what we do know is that humans are extremely good at pattern recognition. Which is why, as the other post said, we’re able to point to individual things that are completely different and say with confidence that they belong in the same category. A common example is dogs. There are countless breeds, different breeds can look significantly different in size, shape, and coloring, and even at the individual level, dogs of the same breed can look pretty different. But we can still look at a dog and recognize pretty easily (most of the time, at least) that it’s a dog. Even if it has genetic deformities or is missing limbs and therefore falls outside of the realm of dogs you’ve seen before, you can still identify it as a dog.
The answer to your question lies in the answer to how we’re able to do what was discussed above. It has to do with our very robust pattern recognition abilities. It allows us to fill in missing bits of information from what we know/expect. This isn’t foolproof, of course. You see plenty of stories about people mistaking strangers for friends and adopting puppies that turn out to be bear cubs. Going back to your specific question regarding poorly rendered drawings, imagine I take a photo of you and someone who shares a lot of your facial features. How far do I have to distort the images before you can’t tell which is which or misidentify the pictures?
My field of study is robotics and AI, and there’s a technology called artificial neural networks we use now that’s based on the biological human brain. The networks are trained much like how a child learns, albeit with much more data. Basically, we feed it examples and tell it whether or not it’s correct in its answer. A lot of modern technologies like search engines, voice recognition, and automated tagging are powered by neural networks.
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