I, too, tend towards mentally overlaying the tiles and looking for movement-patterns as I jump from one tile to another.

In this case, I saw the middle row as a flash of "fire" that burned away some of the first row, and what remained was the content of the third row. (And it worked with columns too, which is how I knew that this was the correct visualization).

I couldn't come up with any verbal summary of the rule. But it still just felt so right somehow.)

What do you think about this? http://www.pnas.org/content/100/19/11163/F2.medium.gif

Psychologists make a distinction between that sort of fuzzy similarity judgement and rule-based analytical reasoning (and the social/cultural factors that predispose people to one or the other). They're both valid ways to think about things in different contexts, but Raven's matrices are definitely rule based and you should probably avoid fuzzy holistic reasoning when trying to solve them correctly.

(In the flower example, one is the holistic grouping and the other is the rule-based grouping)