> humans do not need 10,000 examples to tell the difference between cats and dogs,
I swear, not enough people have kids.
Now, is it 10k examples? No, but I think it was on the order of hundreds, if not thousands.
One thing kids do is they'll ask for confirmation of their guess. You'll be reading a book you've read 50 times before and the kid will stop you, point at a dog in the book, and ask "dog?"
And there is a development phase where this happens a lot.
Also kids can get mad if they are told an object doesn't match up to the expected label, e.g. my son gets really mad if someone calls something by the wrong color.
Another thing toddlers like to do is play silly labeling games, which is different than calling something the wrong name on accident, instead this is done on purpose for fun. e.g. you point to a fish and say "isn't that a lovely llama!" at which point the kid will fall down giggling at how silly you are being.
The human brain develops really slowly[1], and a sense of linear time encoding doesn't really exist for quite awhile. (Even at 3, everything is either yesterday, today, or tomorrow) so who the hell knows how things are being processed, but what we do know is that kids gather information through a bunch of senses, that are operating at an absurd data collection rate 12-14 hours a day, with another 10-12 hours of downtime to process the information.
[1] Watch a baby discover they have a right foot. Then a few days later figure out they also have a left foot. Watch kids who are learning to stand develop a sense of "up above me" after they bonk their heads a few time on a table bottom. Kids only learn "fast" in the sense that they have nothing else to do for years on end.