Enactive mode: | manipulating familiar and confidence-inspiring entities, whether they are physical (blocks, sticks, counters, rods, …), as Bruner suggested, or meta-physical (numerals as numbers, letters as variables or as generalities, familiar diagrams, screen manipulable objects, etc.); |
Iconic mode: | images, pictures and drawings which depict what they are (as in a cloud for a number I am thinking of or don’t yet know) as Bruner suggested, but including also a pre-articulated as-yet-inchoate ‘sense of’; |
Symbolic mode: | symbols whose use is a convention and so by their nature have to be explained, as Bruner suggested, but they are abstractly symbolic only so long as they remain unfamiliar. |