ABSTRACT
Everyone who is old enough is supposed to remember where they were when they heard that President Kennedy had been shot. Actually, I can’t—but I do have my share of “flash-bulb memories”. The questions to ask reasoning researchers is “Where were you when you first encountered the Wason selection task?”. I know where I was: in a small lecture theatre in Gordon Square—the building that once housed the Psychology Department of University College London (UCL). The year was 1968, the lecturer was Phil Johnson-Laird who had recently completed his doctorate under the supervision of Peter Wason. Phil presented the now famous four card problem to the class and invited us to solve it before telling us the answer 1 . This was part of a brilliant series of undergraduate lectures on thinking and psycholinguistics that did much to stimulate my early interest in higher cognitive processes.
