Whoever said technology was dehumanising was wrong. On screens everywhere — cellphones, e-readers, automated

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teller machines — as Diana Ross sang, we just want to reach out and touch.

Scientists and academics who study the ways we interact with technology say that people often try to import those behaviours into their lives, as anyone who has ever wished they could lower the volume on a loud conversation or Google their brain for an answer knows well.

But they say that touching screens has seeped into people’s day-to-day existence more quickly and completely than other technological behaviours because it is so natural, intimate and intuitive.

And so device-makers are focused on fingertips, with touch at the core of the newest wave of computer design, known as natural user interface.

Unlike past interfaces, which were centred on the keyboard and mouse, natural user interface uses ingrained human movements that do not have to be learned.

“It’s part of the general trajectory we’re on in the computing industry — this whole notion of making computers more open to natural human gestures and intentions,” said Eric Horvitz, distinguished scientist at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington.

The latest is a new line of Sony e-readers that the company introduced on Wednesday.

For the first time, all have touchscreens. Sony decided on the technology after watching person after person in focus groups automatically swipe the screens of its older, non-touch e-readers.

Research In Motion now makes touchscreen BlackBerrys.

Amazon.com is expected to make a Kindle with a non-glare touchscreen, and Garmin has introduced touchscreen GPS devices for biking, hiking and driving.

New Canon and Panasonic digital cameras have touchscreens and Diebold, which makes ATMs, says that more than half the machines that US banks order today have touchscreens.

Brides-to-be can scroll through bridesmaid dresses on a Hewlett-Packard touchscreen computer at Priscilla of Boston bridal boutiques, and a liquor store in Houston uses the HP screen as a virtual bartender, giving customers instructions for mixing drinks.

The screens also show up on exercise machines, in hospitals, at airport check-in terminals and on Virgin America airplanes.

“Everyone who touches or takes a reader in their hand, they touch the screen,” said Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading division. “It’s what we do.”

Some people even try to use touchscreens when their devices have none.

“I had to use my sister’s BlackBerry to make a call, and I just kept swiping and touching,” said Susannah Wijsen, 40, who works in advertising in San Francisco and had grown used to tapping out phone numbers on her iPhone screen.

“It didn’t even occur to me to use the keyboard,” she added.

Though scientists have been working on natural user interface, Apple made touching, swiping and flicking at screens mainstream, said Harsha Prahlad, a research engineer who works with robots and sensors at SRI International, a research institute based in California.

“All of the technologies existed, but by bringing it together in a seamless fashion, the iPhone had a lot to do with it,” he said.

Virginia Campbell, 99, learned to type on a typewriter and had never used an ATM or other touchscreen. But when her children gave her an iPad two days after it came out, she found touching the screen to be instinctual.

“It was no problem,” said Campbell, who lives in Lake Oswego, Oregon, and uses her iPad daily to write limericks and reread classic novels. “It was a light tap and I have had no trouble at all.”

Shumin Zhai, a research scientist who studies human-computer interaction at the IBM Almaden Research Centre in San Jose, California, noticed the phenomenon among participants in a study he performed.

“People inevitably point at the screen, thinking something would happen — it’s such a natural behaviour,” he said. “My own 2-year-old daughter amazingly could use the iPad and somehow it was intuitive.”

For readers who are used to turning paper pages, electronic books invite touch perhaps more than anything else. Many Kindle screens have been sullied by errant fingers before their frustrated owners realised that readers turn the pages of an e-book using buttons on the side of the device.

Amazon bought a touchscreen startup, Touchco, but the current touchscreen technology added too much glare, Jeffrey P Bezos, chief executive of Amazon said in an interview when the company introduced the newest Kindle.

“It has to be done in a different way,” Bezos said. “It can’t be a me-too touchscreen.”

Two of Sony’s previous readers, the Touch and Daily Editions, had touchscreens, but they produced a glare and required a hard, forceful touch. In the new versions, Sony removed the top layer of glass from the screen to reduce the glare and effort.

Sony’s new e-readers, whose prices range from $179 to $299 in the United States, are not the cheapest on the market, but Haber said that people were willing to pay for the features they wanted and that touch was at the top of the list.

He noted that when Sony’s last line of e-readers was introduced, many people paid $100 more for the touchscreen version.

The next generation of screens might not even need a touch. Instead, they will understand the gestures of people standing in front of them and pick up on eye movement and speech.

“The future’s going to be in fusing together several different natural human behaviours — how people point, gesture and coordinate with each other,” Horvitz of Microsoft said. “Touch is a beautiful tip of the iceberg for talking about where things are really headed.”