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For the psychology research he mentions, there is a paper, Rebecca Lawson, "The science of cycology: Failures to understand how everyday objects work", https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/~rlawson/PDF_Files/L-M&C-2006.pd...

> The participants were given a single sheet of paper, folded in half. The bicycle drawing task (see Figure 1) and the forced-choice task (see Figure 2) were on the top and bottom of the first side, respectively, and a questionnaire was on the other side. First, the participants were asked to rate their functional knowledge of bicycles on a scale from 1 (“I know little or nothing about how bicycles work”) to 7 (“I have a thorough knowledge of how bicycles work”). Next, they were asked to draw the pedals, chain, and extra frame onto a sketch of a bicycle (see Figure 1). Then, they were asked to select which of four alternative pictures was correct for the bicycle frame, pedals, and chain (see Figure 2).

> Over 40% of nonexperts made at least one error in both the drawing and the forced-choice tasks (see Table 1). In this and the subsequent experiments, error scores were almost as high on the forced-choice task as on the freehand drawing task, indicating that production problems were not the primary cause of people’s deficiencies.



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