Not sure where you see the "minimal resources" here? But I'd just counter all questions about "why" with the blanket response of "for understanding natural inte

Not sure where you see the "minimal resources" here? But I'd just counter all questions about "why" with the blanket response of "for understanding natural intelligence": the way biology innovates is that it throws everything against the wall and not pick the one thing that sticks as the winner and focus on that mechanism, it keeps the sticky bits and also everything else as long as their cost isn't prohibitive. Symbolic modeling ("this is an object that can fall down"), prediction chains based on visual similarity patterns (this), hardwired reflexes (we tend to not trust anything that looks and moves like a spider or snake) and who knows what else, it's all there, it all runs in parallel, invited or not, and they all influence each other in subtle and less subtle ways. The interaction is not engineered, it's more like crosstalk that's allowed to happen and has more upside than downside, or else evolution would have preferred variations of the setup that have less of the kind of crosstalk in question. But in our quest to understand us, it's super exciting to see candidates for processes that perhaps play some role in our minds, in isolation, no matter if that role is big or small.