Human vision systems have the tremendous advantage of being informed by a lifetime of experiential knowledge that helps to contextualize the data within your field of view. Your eyeballs capture visual information — the image of a cat, for example — and your prior experience interprets this collection of reflected light and relates it to the concept of a cat. The complexity of our visual perception system and its close relationship to our memory and higher reasoning capabilities give this visual data the context it needs to provide value in day-to-day activities.

If we were to tease apart our understanding of a cat, we see that a cat is really an amalgamation of several different “features”. These features include a head, ears, a body, four legs, and a tail – all of which combine to trigger our memory systems and higher-order cognitive functions to produce the conceptual understanding that we are seeing a cat. We can break these down even further. A head is composed of two eyes, a nose. Legs include long, roughly cylindrical shapes with paws attached, each with four oblong-shaped toes.