ABSTRACT
The term cognitivism describes an approach to the study of media that is characterized by methodological assumptions and research foci. Because of cognitivism's emphasis on reasoning, argumentation, and naturalism and its focus on the mental world of media users, its closest ties in the academy are to analytic philosophy and the psychological sciences. One important reaction to the early focus on inference-making and hypothesis-forming, both in cognitive science and film and media cognitivism, was to supplement this constructivist-oriented work with new research initiatives focused on "hot cognition," or affect-driven mental processes. The structural difference of running gags in television generates at least one more artistic effect that is modest yet distinctive; such gags afford cognitive pleasure of a different order than that provided by running gags in film. The feature that unites cognitivist research is a commitment to naturalism. "Naturalism" is a notoriously vague term, which refers to a cluster of views with somewhat varied ontological and methodological commitments.
