A brief history of the Wason selection task

My talk at Ken Manktelow’s Festschrift conference was titled ‘Whatever happened to the selection task?’. However, some recent study of Web of Science has convinced me that my reports of its demise were somewhat exaggerated. While certainly past its prime, research on the task continues to feature in a number of recent publications, as we shall see. What the task has contributed overall to the psychology of reasoning in its 50 odd years of life is, however, quite remarkable. I offer here a brief, selective, affectionate and doubtless biased account of its history.