An interesting observation. I agree completely that the raw quale itself is not stored, but rather the interpretation of the same. This is the most efficient and readily usable form for the quick use required in our evolutionary journey.
Your reference to a form of storage "appropriate for interpretation" is in keeping with analysis of perception and conceptualization by Charles S. Peirce. His categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness are applicable to the knowledge process from perception to conceptulization. Peirce did much work on the epistemological and psychological aspects of knowledge aquisition. Here is a chart from Wikipedia's entry on Peirce's categories that may be of interest to you.
Peirce's
categories (technical name: the cenopythagorean categories)
Name:
Typical
characterizaton:
As
universe of experience:
As
quantity:
Technical
definition:
Valence,
"adicity":
Firstness.[9]
Quality of feeling.
Ideas, chance, possibility.
Vagueness, "some".
Reference to a ground (a ground is a pure abstraction of a
quality).[10]
Essentially monadic (the quale, in the sense of the such,[11]which has the quality).
Secondness.[12]
Reaction, resistance, (dyadic) relation.
Brute facts, actuality.
Singularity, discreteness, “this”.
Reference to a correlate (by its relate).
Essentially dyadic (the relate and the correlate).
Thirdness.[13]
Representation, mediation.
Habits, laws, necessity.
Generality, continuity, "all".
Reference to an interpretant*.
Essentially triadic (sign, object, interpretant*).
*Note: An interpretant is an interpretation (human or otherwise) in the sense of
the product of an interpretive process. (The context for interpretants is not
psychology or sociology, but instead philosophical logic. In a sense, an
interpretant is whatever can be understood as a conclusion of an inference. The
context for the categories as categories is phenomenology, which Peirce also
called phaneroscopy and categorics.)
References: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Categories_(Peirce)&printable=yes