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It's nothing at all like that. I already mentioned the Selection task above, it's a very googleable term. It's old and there is yet no theory fully explaining why people fail at it as they do. Pragmatic reasoning schemas are the nearest attempt at an explanation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task

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by serendipity I clicked through on this link and sgentle's link to Kay on McLuhan and the following sentence comes remarkably close to my experience of the two presentations of the Selection task:

> .. the most important thing about any communications medium is that message receipt is really message recovery: anyone who wishes to receive a message embedded in a medium must first have internalized the medium so it can be “subtracted” out to leave the message behind.

(a tangent, but perhaps interesting)

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