Design implications: 
- Use consistency across and within platforms. 
- Be careful when re-arranging system controls because it can disrupt spatial memory and make things more difficult to find. 
- It is also good to provide "user-arranged" areas for storing documents and objects, such as a desktop. 
- To draw attention to items, you can place them at the beginning or end of lists.

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

People often use their spatial memory to locate elements they've previously interacted with, rather than remembering what that element was called. They might do this by recalling where something was located on the screen, or recalling where it was relative to the other things around it. Once they get used to a certain spatial layout, their navigation through it becomes similar to habituation.

One thing to note is that people are more likely to remember where things are when they place it themselves. Additionally, the primacy and recency effect occurs with menus, where people cognitively tend to remember the first and last things in a list better than the things in the middle.

Spatial Memory

Designing Interfaces, 3rd Edition
by Aynne Valencia; Charles Brewer; Jenifer Tidwell
Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2020

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