I suppose this opinion will be controversial among psychologists and neurophysiologists, but I state it anyway. What humans remember about the appearance of an object are attached to their more stable memories of its physical structure and maybe even to memories of its function. For example, my pocket knife is in my pocket, and I remember what blades it has. If required to draw it from memory, I would consult this memory of its structure and draw that. Only a small part of the information used would be visual memories.
Physical structure is more stable than appearance.
However, this curiosity is focussed. Just how it is focussed isn't obvious. It seems to be supposed that children learn what to do in situations by being rewarded. The innate mechanism may be more powerful than that. One learns what one is supposed to do and does it without reinforcement of the specific kind of response.