Technology is central to human life but hard to define and study. This review synthesizes advances in fields from anthropology to evolutionary biology and neuroscience to propose an interdisciplinary cognitive science of technology. The foundation of this effort is an evolutionarily motivated definition of technology that highlights three key features: material production, social collaboration, and cultural reproduction. This broad scope respects the complexity of the subject but poses a challenge for theoretical unification. Addressing this challenge requires a comparative approach to reduce the diversity of real-world technological cognition to a smaller number of recurring processes and relationships. To this end, a synthetic perceptual-motor hypothesis (PMH) for the evolutionary–developmental–cultural construction of technological cognition is advanced as an initial target for investigation.

技术是人类生活的核心，但很难定义和研究。这篇综述综合了从人类学到进化生物学和神经科学领域的进展，提出了一种跨学科的认知技术科学。这项工作的基础是对技术的进化驱动定义，它强调了三个关键特征：物质生产、社会合作和文化再生产。这种广泛的范围尊重主题的复杂性，但对理论统一提出了挑战。应对这一挑战需要一种比较方法，将现实世界技术认知的多样性减少到较少数量的重复过程和关系。为此，