Our “innate mental categories” and Kant’s are by no means the same. He believed that the categories are innate because they refer to a meaning beyond ourselves (in other words, that we process Euclidean geometry because space is Euclidean, and we contain the seeds of something that Knows this without evidence). We, upon discovering an innate mental category, can file it among “things to exploit or fix”.
That rats have a grid prior to experience is unsurprising. They derive more evolutionary benefit from such a heuristic than from having to lug aroudn an expanded brain capable of inventing geometry.
Our “innate mental categories” and Kant’s are by no means the same. He believed that the categories are innate because they refer to a meaning beyond ourselves (in other words, that we process Euclidean geometry because space is Euclidean, and we contain the seeds of something that Knows this without evidence). We, upon discovering an innate mental category, can file it among “things to exploit or fix”.
That rats have a grid prior to experience is unsurprising. They derive more evolutionary benefit from such a heuristic than from having to lug aroudn an expanded brain capable of inventing geometry.