Editorial: Cognitive Aspects of Interactive Technology Use: From Computers to Smart Objects and Autonomous Agents

Abstract

The current advancements in many interactive technology fields, and the consequent spread of digital and intelligent devices in the consumer market, give the opportunity of deepening, exploring, and even rethinking the foundations of human technology use. The increasing adoption of wearable and self-tracking technologies (Rapp et al., [8]), for instance, is changing how people reflect on themselves (Rapp and Tirassa, [10]), think of their past (Matassa et al., [5]; Elsden et al., [3]), perform physical activity and sport (Rapp and Tirabeni, [9]), and manage their health (Schroeder et al., [13]), encouraging us to explore the impacts of such technologies on mind and behavior. Likewise, people spend more and more time in digital environments, like video games (Rapp, [11]), social media (Lu et al., [4]), and virtual organizations (Reinecke et al., [12]), whereby these virtual and augmented realities are blurring the boundaries between the digital and the material world, potentially affecting how we experience and perceive what we call the reality. The miniaturization of sensors and the rise of the Internet of Things (Atzori et al., [1]) are further making traditional human-computer interfaces disappear (Console et al., [2]), at the same time modifying the affordances that are commonly associated to everyday objects (Rapp and Cena, [7]). Lastly, the increasing ubiquity of different types of interactive robots and autonomous agents, suggests that we investigate in-depth how we humanize artificial entities (Warshaw et al., [15]), how we socially interact with them (Rapp, [6]), and how we understand their behavior (Thellman et al., [14]). These represent only a few examples of technological changes that are reconfiguring how we interact with “tools,” which can inspire a renewed discussion on human-technology interaction. This volume precisely explores how humans create, interact, account for, and are impacted by emerging interactive technologies.