The invention provides a computer-implemented chunking process (named “OP”) to assign and physically associate unique spatial representations (“chunk codes”) in one representational (coding) space (“chunk coding space”) with unique temporal sequences of spatial codes (“items”) in another coding space (“item coding space”). OP differs from all prior chunking processes in that, for any particular item sequence, it activates a unique chunk code for that sequence during presentation of that sequence's first item, even if other sequences from the input domain may begin with the same item.