Determining cognitive categories by their invariances

The world as we perceive it is structured into objects, actions and places. In this talk my aim is to explain why these categories are cognitively primary. From an empiricist and evolutionary standpoint, it is argued that the reduction complexity of sensory signals is based on the brain’s capacity to identify various types of invariances that are evolutionarily relevant for the activities of the organism. The aim of the article is to explain why places, object and actions are primary cognitive categories in our constructions of the external world. Following Breidbach and Jost (2006), it is shown that the invariances that determine these categories have their separate characteristics and that they are, by and large, independent of each other. This separation is supported by what is known about the neural mechanisms. The invariances for the category of numbers is also briefly discussed.