Relational thinking: An overlooked component of executive functioning

Abstract

Relational thinking, the ability to represent abstract, generalizable relations, is a core component of reasoning and human cognition. Relational thinking contributes to fluid reasoning and academic achievement, particularly in the domain of math. However, due to the complex nature of many fluid reasoning tasks, it has been difficult to determine the degree to which relational thinking has a separable role from cognitive processes collectively known as executive functions (EFs). Here, we used a simplified reasoning task to better understand how relational thinking contributes to math achievement in a large, diverse sample of elementary and middle school students (N = 942). Students also performed a set of ten adaptive EF assessments, as well as tests of math fluency and fraction magnitude comparison. We found that relational thinking was significantly correlated with each of the three EF composite scores previously derived from this dataset, albeit no more strongly than they were with each other. Further, relational thinking predicted unique variance in students’ math fluency and fraction magnitude comparison scores over and above the three EF composites. Thus, we propose that relational thinking be considered an EF in its own right as one of the core mid-level cognitive abilities that supports cognition and goal-directed behavior.

Why Doesn’t Executive Function Training Improve Academic Achievement? Rethinking Individual Differences, Relevance, and Engagement from a Contextual Framework

“…Individual executive function tasks often correlate poorly with each other, creating task-specific variance, even when tasks are designed to measure similar aspects of executive function (e.g., Friedman et al, 2006;Karr et al, 2018Karr et al, , 2022Starr et al, 2022). Task-specific variance in performance on different executive function tasks is partially driven by differences in familiarity with the specific cues and stimuli used in different measures of executive function; that is, task-specific variation in performance is not only a consequence of the idiosyncratic differences between particular tasks but also due to a child's personal, historical, and cultural experiences with task content, which eases the cognitive demands associated with processing task cues and stimuli.…”