This very much reminds me of the work by the late James Albus, who wrote about hierarchy in the brain back in the late 70s. He did a 3 part series on his CMAC theory in Byte magazine, and I just found a scan of it here: https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1979-08-rescan/1979_08_BYTE_04-08_LISP#page/n67/mode/2up

Thanks for the interesting article and the blast from the past it reminded me of! I based some of my own work in AI off of Albus' work and one day I'll have to dig out the code and see if I can get my simulated animals running once again.