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In human history, representations play a significant role for the development of knowledge, skills and identities and for all the various kinds of social practices that go into community building and social life in general. As Luria (1981) and many others have pointed out, people do not just live in the world, we can also communicate about it (cf. Cole, 1996, p. 120). A necessary prerequisite for being able to communicate about the world is that we have access to symbolic representations by means of which we can represent, categorize, configure and comment upon our experiences. Such resources allow us to distance ourselves from the world, and at the same time we become able to perspectivize what we see and hear as something, as instances of something we are already familiar with, or as novelties with some interesting, previously un-noticed, qualities. In other words, representations serve as resources for communicating and meaningmaking, and they are essential to all human practices including perception, remembering and thinking and other psychological activities. What we refer to as cognition are activities of meaning-making made possible largely through the use of representations. In the sociocultural tradition (Wertsch, 1985, 2007; Vygotsky, 1986), the idea of mediation and mediated action is fundamental. The concept of mediation was originally introduced byVygotsky to argue against the simplistic notion of human behaviour as simple responses to stimuli in the outside world. The idea of stimulus–response connections as the core of human learning and development was the basic assumption of the Pavlovian reflexology (and, in …