The still-emerging paradigm of situated cognition requires a more systematic perspective on media to capture how culture shapes the mind. Cultural artifacts, as media, provide central experiential models for embodied minds. The paper identifies references to external media within embodied, extended, enactive, and predictive approaches to cognition, which underdevelop media's profound impact. To address this, an enactive account of media is proposed, based on expansive habits as media-structured, embodied ways of bringing forth meaning. These habits, applied when seeing a picture or perceiving a movie, become established through reciprocal adaptation between media artifacts and organisms.
Enactive approaches to art argue that aesthetic experience is non-contentful, artifact-including, and embodied, and they often dismiss empirical (neuro)aesthetics as unable to capture this engagement. This paper reviews radical enactivism, Gallagher's embodied-enactive account of art affordances, and Noë's view of art as reorganizational practice. While agreeing with the relational and enactive nature of mind, the author contends that dismissing empirical aesthetics is misguided: the criticism is either too general about methods or based on philosophical claims open to empirical testing. Relevant empirical research exists that enactive theorists should consider.
Aesthetic emotions such as being moved, interest, and wonder play a central role in how people engage with artworks. Within the embodied-enactive framework of the mind, these emotions structure the exploratory activities that artworks afford through their distinctive embodied cognitive styles. They also contribute critically to evaluating artworks as artworks. Exploration and evaluation are closely intertwined in aesthetic engagement. By bringing empirical work on embodiment in aesthetics into dialogue with enactive theories of art, the chapter advances a critical neuro-aesthetics and a better understanding of aesthetic emotions as an under-explored class of mental processes within philosophy of mind and 4E cognition.