The present invention relates to a system and methodology for extending and making more appropriate the interactive decisions made by automated services by taking into consideration estimates of the time required by users for the cognitive processing of problems, visualizations, and content based on several factors, including the competency and familiarity of the user with the output and nature of the sequences of output, the complexity of the output and overall tasks being considered, and the context of the user. The methods allow automated applications to control the rate at which the applications interact with users. Portions of automated services are controlled in view of limited human processor capabilities in design/operation of such services, and/or visualizations/output from the services (e.g., amount of dwell time provided/considered before a next automated sequence is displayed/invoked). Models can be formulated and utilized in conjunction with automated services such as automatically determining and pausing a period of time before a next sequence in a service is enabled or disabled. The models can also be employed to determine multiple dwells for comprehension, as a function of complexity of graphical/conceptual relationships, at different phases of an animation.