Adaptive Perspectives on Human-Technology Interaction

In everyday life, and particularly in the modern workplace, information technology and automation increasingly mediate, augment, and sometimes even interfere with how humans interact with their environment. How to understand and support cognition in human-technology interaction is both a practically and socially relevant problem. The chapters in this volume frame this problem in adaptive terms:: how are behaviour and cognition adapted, or perhaps ill-adapted, to the demands andopportunities of an environment where interaction is mediated by tools and technology? The authors draw heavily on the work of Egon Brunswik, a pioneer in ecological and cognitive psychology, as well as on modern refinements and extensions of Brunswikian ideas, including Hammonds Social Judgment Theory,Gigerenzers Ecological Rationality and Andersons Rational Analysis. Inspired by Brunswiks view of cognition as coming to terms with the causal texture of the external world, the chapters in this volume provide quantitative and computational models and measures for studying how people come to terms with an increasingly technological ecology, and provide insights for supporting cognition and performance through design, training, and other interventions. The methods, models, and measurespresented in this book provide timely and important resources for addressing problems in the rapidly growing field of human-technology interaction.