Jeff Hawkins, A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence. It describes the importance of reference frames for intelligence, for locating limbs relative to the body, locating the body in space, locating objects in space (even abstract objects in abstract spaces), and a possible "implementation" of that in the columns of the neocortex (by, basically, if I understood correctly, positing certain neurons that encode location, eg via intersection of coordinates, and certain neurons that encode features, and then learning a connection between those).
A short and interesting read (with quite some implications for progress in AI).
Podcast with Sam Harris: https://samharris.org/podcasts/255-future-intelligence/
Jeff Hawkins at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Hawkins
The tech developed by his AI company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_temporal_memory
Book at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Brains-New-Theory-Intelligen...
ETA: Oh, quite some previous discussion on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20326396
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19311279
A new book by Jeff Hawkins is coming out [0].
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> That must be a mechanism in the brain rather than the eye
Check out "A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence" [1] by Jeff Hawkins [2], of PalmPilot fame. This theory postulates, in part, and with evidence, that brains are continuously comparing sensory input and movement context with learned models. I found the book to be mind-blowing, so to speak ...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Brains-New-Theory-Intelligen...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Hawkins