Rodolfo Perez

The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston · School of Public Health

Relational thinking involves comparing abstract relationships between mental representations that vary in complexity; however, this complexity is rarely made explicit during everyday comparisons. This study explored how people naturally navigate relational complexity and interference using a novel relational match-to-sample (RMTS) task with both mi...

Performing relational comparisons is considered among the most intelligent cognitive capacities. Animal studies have demonstrated that chimpanzees and crows are capable of relational reasoning with second-order relationships (e.g., analogies); however, it has been hypothesized that only humans are capable of reasoning with third-order relationships...

Our ability to integrate increasingly complex relationships underlies human reasoning (Holyoak & Thagard, 1995), relies on the prefrontal cortex (e.g., Christoff et al., 2001; Waltz et al., 1999), and correlates with intelligence (Marshalek, Lohman, & Snow, 1983). Kroger, Holyoak, and Hummel (2004) demonstrated that comparing increasingly complex r...