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 minimal and relationally directed instruction to observe changes in performance across three levels of relational complexity: perceptual, analogy, and system mappings. Individual working memory and relational abilities were examined to understand RMTS performance and susceptibility to interfering relational structures. Trials were presented without practice across four blocks, and participants received feedback after each attempt to guide learning. Experiment 1 instructed participants to select the target that best matched the sample, whereas Experiment 2 additionally directed participants' attention to same and different relations. Participants in Experiment 2 demonstrated improved performance when solving analogical mappings, suggesting that directing attention to relational characteristics affected behavior. Higher performing participants—those with above-chance performance on the final block of system mappings—solved more analogical RMTS problems and had greater visuospatial working memory, abstraction, verbal analogy, and scene analogy scores compared to lower performers. Lower performers were less dynamic in their performance across blocks and demonstrated negative relationships between analogy and system mapping accuracy, suggesting increased interference between these relational structures. Participant performance on RMTS problems did not change monotonically with relational complexity, suggesting that increases in relational complexity places nonlinear demands on working memory. We argue that competing relational information causes additional interference, especially in individuals with lower executive function abilities.

关系思维涉及比较复杂程度不同的心理表征之间的抽象关系；然而，这种复杂性很少在日常比较中表现得淋漓尽致。本研究探索了人们如何使用新的关系匹配到样本 (RMTS) 任务自然地驾驭关系复杂性和干扰，其中包含最小和关系定向指令，以观察三个关系复杂性级别的性能变化：感知、类比和系统映射. 检查个人工作记忆和关系能力以了解 RMTS 性能和对干扰关系结构的敏感性。试验在四个模块中进行，没有练习，参与者在每次尝试指导学习后都会收到反馈。实验 1 指示参与者选择与样本最匹配的目标，而实验 2 额外引导参与者注意相同和不同的关系。实验 2 的参与者在解决类比映射时表现出提高的性能，这表明将注意力集中在关系特征上会影响行为。与表现较差的参与者相比，表现较高的参与者——那些在系统映射的最后一个块上表现优于机会的参与者——解决了更多类比的 RMTS 问题，并具有更高的视觉空间工作记忆、抽象、语言类比和场景类比分数。表现较差的人在跨区块的表现中缺乏活力，并且表现出类比与系统映射准确性之间的负相关关系，表明这些关系结构之间的干扰增加。RMTS 问题的参与者表现不会随着关系复杂性而单调变化，这表明关系复杂性的增加对工作记忆提出了非线性要求。我们认为，相互竞争的关系信息会引起额外的干扰，尤其是对执行功能能力较低的个体。