I see this as a huge unsolved problem for HTM systems.
HTM is great at saying “I saw this thing” before. It can even say “I saw this sequence” before.
I really don’t see how HTM will be able to match up some cue, like a perceived printed or spoken word to a paired sound or image or stream of tokens that make an image.
The current excitement in Numenta regarding the coding in tuples of grid nodes (object) (displacement) (object) does not really solve this problem yet. That gets us to a representation of the relation of perceived features. The work to use hierarchy to resolve that to a higher level representation is unfinished
I have high hopes that I can bridge this problem using hex-grid coding and tuples of tokens and sequences of tokens but at this point I do not have a functioning system. I do think that the enabling technology will be the dumb boss/smart adviser model but I have not worked out how these systems interact to the point where they function together organically. The few toy attempts produced very limited stereotyped behavior.