To explain such habits, I take my cue from enactivism and recent theories of embodied or radical predictive processing ( Clark, 2013, 2015a). In this paper, I propose an understanding of our engagement with media artifacts based on a theory of habits. Yet paradoxically, media phenomena do not occupy a central place within the discourse on situated cognition.

In these contexts, situated cognition is well-placed to examine how sociocultural niches scaffold and structure the mind. Alongside images, texts, and sounds, new varieties of media (especially in digital form) profoundly shape human “pattern practices” ( Roepstorff et al., 2010) across cultural domains. This discussion demonstrates the need for a new cognitive media theory based on enactive artifactual habits-one that will help us gain perspective on the continuous re-mediation of our mind. After a short primer on general media theory, I discuss media examples in three domains: pictures and moving images digital media architecture and the built environment. To detail how neural and media processes interlock, I will introduce the concept of neuromediality and discuss radical predictive processing accounts that could contribute to the externalization of the mind by treating media themselves as generative models of the world. Both the plurality of habits and the dynamical adjustments within a habit require a more flexible neural architecture than is addressed by classical cognitive neuroscience. Within an artifactual habit, we then become attuned to a specific media work (e.g., a TV series, a picture, a text, or even a city) that engages us. They become established through a process of reciprocal adaptation between media artifacts and organisms and define the range of viable actions within such a media ecology. We apply such habits, for instance, when seeing a picture or perceiving a movie. To grasp this impact, I propose an enactive account of media that is based on expansive habits as media-structured, embodied ways of bringing forth meaning and new domains of values.

The paper identifies references to external media within embodied, extended, enactive, and predictive approaches to cognition, which remain underdeveloped in terms of the profound impact that media have on our mind. By virtue of being media, cultural artifacts present central experiential models of the world for our embodied minds to latch onto. This paper argues that the still-emerging paradigm of situated cognition requires a more systematic perspective on media to capture the enculturation of the human mind.

Gardenscapes level 1051 jan 2018