The temporal evolution of the system when cubes are introduced as novel objects along with spheres and cylinders. (A) Bottom-up hub activation through perceptual streams shows the presence of three objects. This information is also copied into the VSSP. Hub activity generates partial cues leading to recall of past experiences (EM1 and EM2 that encode knowledge related to spheres and cylinders). (B) EM1 and EM2 compete to gain top-down control of the hub. Temporal evolution of the top-down influence of these competing memories on the object hub is shown. EM1 emerges the winner in this simple case because of the greater reward fetched by it and gains full control of the hub. Note that bottom-up and top-down object hub activity are different, indicating that not everything about the present world is known through past experience. (C) Action sequence encoded by winning memory EM1 enters the construction system and is combined with two explorative actions: either binding at the end or at the beginning of the chunk that comes from past experience. The episode that fetches greater reward is stored as a new memory (placing the cube at the bottom, stacking the cylinder on top of it and sphere on top of the cylinder: EM3). The updated connectivity matrix T is shown in the right corner.