During our nearly constant use of digital devices, perhaps our most frequent need is to visually identify icons representing our content and invoke the actions to manipulate them. Almost since the inception of user interface design in the 1970s, with rare exception it has become the tendency for programmers to prescribe the arrangement these things in uniform rectilinear rows and columns. This was imported from theories for print design and ultimately brought into widespread practice for graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Whether consistent rectilinearity actually does better than less rectilinear arrangements to maximize selection efficiency has not been challenged on considerations of speed or any other measure. In a series of four experiments, we explore how alignment may in fact discourage easy recallability of screen object locations and hence increase search intensity. A second objective is to present a methodological model where we deliberately attempt to begin with psychophysical cognitive evidence at the environmental schematic low end (beginning with contextual cueing paradigm), then move progressively upwards in naturalism in the experiments to something that approximates actual human work at the higher end, all along attempting to keep one important environmental property constant. Two experiments using contextual cueing paradigm confirm that collinearly aligned arrays do not encourage recallability of location, while noncollinear arrays appear to create traces that can be recalled automatically. Two other experiments give further demonstration of explicit recollection and location recall, showing that collinear arrangements may in fact induce location recall errors to neighboring collinear objects. We discuss surrounding theoretical, historical, and practical questions.

翻译：在我们几乎持续使用数字设备的过程中，最频繁的需求或许就是视觉识别代表内容的图标，并调用相关操作来操控它们。自20世纪70年代用户界面设计诞生以来，几乎毫无例外地，程序员们倾向于将这些元素排列成统一的直线行列布局。这一做法源自印刷设计理论，最终在图形用户界面（GUI）中广泛应用。然而，这种一致性直线排列是否真的能比非直线排列更有效地提升选择效率，至今未从速度或其他衡量指标上受到质疑。通过一系列四项实验，我们探索了对齐如何可能反而阻碍屏幕对象位置的易回忆性，从而增加搜索强度。第二个目标是提出一种方法论模型：我们有意从低端的环境图式认知证据出发（以语境提示范式为起点），然后逐步向自然主义的高端实验推进，直至近似人类实际工作的场景，同时始终尝试保持一项重要环境属性的恒定。两项采用语境提示范式的实验证实，共线对齐的阵列不利于位置回忆，而非共线阵列则能自动形成可回忆的痕迹。另外两项实验进一步展示了显式回忆和位置回忆，表明共线排列实际上可能引发向邻近共线对象的位置回忆错误。我们探讨了相关的理论、历史及实践问题。