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I strongly suspect it's a tokenization problem. Text and symbols fit nicely in tokens, but having something like a single "dog leg" token is a tough problem to solve.

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The neural network in the retina actually pre-processes visual information into something akin to "tokens". Basic shapes that are probably somewhat evolutionarily preserved. I wonder if we could somehow mimic those for tokenization purposes. Most likely there's someone out there already trying.

(Source: "The mind is flat" by Nick Chater)

It's also easy to spot as when you are tired you might misrecognize objects, I caught myself with this when doing long roadtrips

AFAIK this is actually a separate mechanism, which is part of the visual cortex and not the retina. Essentially recognizing even a single object requires the complete attention of pretty much your entire brain in the moment of recognition.

What I am referring to is a much more basic form of shape recognition that goes on at the level of the neural networks in the retina.

I think in this case, tokenization and percpetion are somewhat analogous. I think it is probably the case our current tokenization schemes are really simplistic compared to what nature is working with. If you allow the analogy.

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