Recognition is Easy; Recall is Hard
Abstract
This chapter describes important differences between recognition and recall, mainly that recognition is easy for the human brain and recall is hard. It describes how recognition and recall work in the brain. Patterns of neural activity, which is what memories are, can be activated in two different ways: by more perceptions coming in from the senses and by other brain activity. The former is recognition; the latter is recall. It then discusses the resulting guidelines for user-interface design, with examples.
Keywords
memory; recognition; recall; neural patterns; face recognition; command-line user interface; menu-based user interface; graphical user interface (GUI); thumbnail image; icon ...
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