2009. In Tzekaki, M., Kaldrimidou, M. & Sakonidis, C. (Eds.). Proceedings of the 33rd Conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, Vol. 1, pp. XXX"YYY. Thessaloniki, Greece: PME. 1" 1 RELATIOSHIPS BETWEE SESORYACTIVITY, CULTURAL ARTEFACTS AD MATHEMATICAL COGITIO Lulu Healy Solange Hassan Ahmad Ali Fernandes Universidade Bandeirante de São Paulo Colégio Nossa Senhora do Rosário To explore the construction of mathematical meanings in learning settings, we focus on the coordinations of speech, gestures, material objects and sensory activities in a dialogue between a mathematics teacher (researcher) and a blind student. We argue that as the student came to know the mathematical object in question (a pyramid), the teacher too engaged in a process of reconceiving the object through the hands (eyes) of the student. We argue that in the search for a more inclusive mathematics education, we need to pay more attention to ways that students who lack access to one or other sensory field, both to create more accessible learning situations and to extend our understanding of the interplays between perception and conception. ITRODUCTIO AD BACKGROUD It can hardly be controversial to claim that we develop and that we learn by interacting within the various biological, social and cultural systems that make up the world as we experience it. Individuals construct their own meanings of the mathematics they encounter which depend upon the ways and means through which they come in to contact with the knowledge culturally labelled as mathematics, as well as upon their individual resources – physical, visual, auditory and cognitive. And yet the precise nature of the relations between perception, cognition and culture has long been an academic battleground. We might go back to Plato who distinguished between that perceived through the senses and that perceived by the soul, judging the first untrustworthy and deceptive and the second the intellectual route to the universal forms representing the true essence of reality. A perspective countered by Aristotle, who argued that our knowledge initiates from that which comes to us first in the form of sensations from our sense organs. As we fast forward to the Enlightenment, the debate continues, with the Empiricists, defending the idea that all knowledge is a consequence of experience and the Rationalists insisting that the rules of reason are the means through which knowledge comes to the mind and soul. Forward again to the 1960s and 70s and the emergence of Mathematics Education as an academic discipline, it was Piaget’s constructivist perspective, which emphasises the learner as a rational being whose activities are guided by her (mental) logical structures, which dominated research efforts. Finally, as we move into current times, the focus has moved from the individual learner to learners interacting in cultural settings. While in the past, the controversy concentrated on the relationships between experience and intellect of the individual, today cultural and semiotic considerations vie for centre stage, and yet as embodied cognition too enters onto the