ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a series of studies on children's relational reasoning to illustrate how Bob's mentorship has profoundly and continuously shaped the thinking and influenced his own work, even 20 years later. Relational thinking, or the capacity to manipulate in our minds abstract mental representations of relations among objects, attributes, and events, is central to human thinking and learning. The chapter illustrates the use of the encoding, integrating, and toggling processes by the four groups, indicating that older children and those who successfully solved the matrix problems more effectively were more likely to use the encoding, integrating, and toggling components than younger children and those who did not do well in solving the problems, respectively. It examines the patterns of children's fixations on each of the alternatives within the response space. The chapter examines the role of working memory on analogical problem-solving as well as the processing strategy involved in mapping the relations.
