Child-Development

Bruner described enactive, iconic, and symbolic forms of representation; Montessori materials make a useful, but not historically direct, comparison. Physical materials can support particular learning tasks, while evidence does not justify treating a touchscreen as a universal developmental failure.

Socks before shoes is a useful analogy for order-dependent operations. It does not explain quantum uncertainty, and infant sequence memory is not evidence of group-theoretic understanding. The shared structure is narrower: changing operation order can change, or prevent, the result.