ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how understanding a set of basic cognitive processes—implicit and incidental learning, knowledge representation, familiarity, transfer, and automaticity—can help. It explains how an interaction can be intuitive or become intuitive over time. Still, Still, and Grgic (2015) suggest that an interaction will be intuitive if the mental representation of the interaction is similar to one already stored in memory and the action associated with the stored representation is automatically applied to the current situation. In order to predict a priori what interactions will be familiar, some understanding of the mental representations supporting the interaction is required. But, as Cleary, Langley, and Seiler note, "little is known about the types of features that may actually be present in human memory traces. Interaction consistency is the key to producing automatization, which leads to a lighter working memory load, controlled processing of interface interactions results in a user's awareness of the actions (Posner & Snyder, 1975).
