Because so many logical errors that seem to be perniciously pervasive and persistent involve incorrect notions of implication relationships--that is, the concept of "if___then___"--we want to understand as much as we can about this much studied oddity from the cognitive sciences.

The intense interest in the puzzle was kicked off by a book published in the early 1970's by Percy C Wason (Cambridge University).  It was the subject of many popular publications, and Martin Gardner put a related, five-card,  puzzle with a diabolical twist in his "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American.  Some of the published research was reminiscent of Richard Feynman's observation of the lack of understanding of virtually all of the authors of published K-12 science textbooks:  "...written by people who don;t know what the hell they are talking about."  The authors of the research and textbooks are very bright people, but neverthless sometimes eminate an aura of blindness to this important dimension of perception of patterns at the edges of human comprehension--patterns of patterns of...that constitute the more abstract mathematical patterns.

The relationship to the error of "Energy is the capacity to do work" is particularly noteworthy.  The widespread confusion of the energy of science with the energy of common use (Aristotle's concept) is one of the most important of common oversimplifications to be overcome before we can understand the simple (but subtle) basis of today's science.  It's worth a lot of effort to anyone who wants to get a leg up on seeing science.

One crucially important observation about misperceptions of "if___then___", is that people who are extremely intelligent by conventional notions of "intelligence" ("IQ or "g-factor," etc) might still be "logic blind" to that pattern of pattern (of pattern of...) which is implication -- blind to that Boolean thing which logicians represent with their Boolean equation.