Psychology of Technology

This unique treatise expands on the philosophy of science to argue for a psychology of technology based on our complex relationships with our digital devices, our online lives, and our human experience. Drawing from disciplines ranging from philosophy and evolution to cognitive and neuroscience, it examines myriad aspects of the brain's creative development: the cognitive, sensory, and motor processes that desire and enable technological progress and its resulting efficiencies, comforts, and pleasures. These pleasures are key to behavioral and affective processes in technology, manifest in such diverse phenomena as multitasking, the shift in tech design from ergonomics to hedonomics, and the many types of online problem behaviors. Through these rich pages, readers can understand more deeply the history and future of human adjustment and adaptation-and, with the ascendance of video games and virtual reality, new conceptions of the human self. Among the topics covered: * Could we have remained a tech-devoid society? * Technology and the non-executive functions of our body. * New directions in brain-computer interface. * From avatars and agents to virtual reality technology.* On measuring affective responses to objects. * Psychology, technology, ethics, and culture. A timely lens on a field that will grow in importance as it shapes our existence, Psychology of Technology will be read and discussed by psychologists, social scientists, and behavioral scientists.