Professor Paulina Sliwa, a philosopher at the University of Vienna who worked on the topic while at the University of Cambridge, says this mechanism is backed up by science.

“Neuroscience has shown that perceiving an affordance can trigger neural processes preparing you for physical action,” she says. “This can range from a slight urge to overwhelming compulsion, but it often takes mental effort not to act on an affordance.”

Every person sees a specific thing and perceives it differently. For example, one person might see a gap between two objects as jumpable, or a tree as climbable, while another might think both things are impossible.

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Dr Tom McClelland, from Cambridge University’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science, says that applying this theory to the home might explain the inequality in chore workload. The team believes that men and women see the domestic situation differently as a result of how they were raised.

“This puts women in a catch-22 situation: either inequality of labour or inequality of cognitive load,” Sliwa said. “Some skills are explicitly gendered, such as cleaning or grooming, and girls are expected to do more domestic chores than boys. This trains their ways of seeing the domestic environment, to see a counter as ‘to be wiped’,” McClelland said.

The “gendered affordance perception hypothesis”, as it has been called, is not about absolving men, the philosophers emphasise.

Just because men do not instinctively make the leap from mess to task and feel the impulse to tidy does not mean they are incapable of making the decision manually.

“We can change how we perceive the world through continued conscious effort and habit cultivation,” said McClelland. The research is published in the journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.

The Telegraph, London