Tentativeness is often framed as a deficit, synonymous with timidity or a lack of confidence. In this article, I situate the notion of tentativeness in an enactivist framework and describe its role as both a strategy and affordance in a spatial visualization exercise. Drawing on insights from mathematics education and ecological psychology, I…

Reports on a case study of a student who constructs formalism not from processes of quantification, but from his own visuospatial imagery. Rather than construct new objects from cognitive processes, the student reflects on mental objects already in mind and refines them to build an interpretation of the formal theory. This example leads to…

Identifying the strengths of visual processing in high school mathematics is considered. The development of an instrument to assess mathematical processing is described. Then the kinds of visual imagery found in children in England and Natal are presented, along with difficulties and benefits experienced by visualizers. (MNS)