8/ ➕ Result #3: Our study revealed a monotonic, additive relationship between distance and abstraction.
Proximity on one dimension (e.g., socially) does not undo the abstraction caused by distance on others.

4/ 🔬 To measure abstraction, we used two complementary approaches: Quantifying the use of concrete vs. abstract words in participants’ stories and a neural network trained to assess the degree of episodic vs. semantic details.

3/ ✍️ In this preregistered study with 1,001 participants, people thought of people, places, and times they deem close or far. They wrote short stories about these events, with distance factorially manipulated across spatial, temporal, and social dimensions to examine its effects on abstraction.

2/ 🌍 Imagine feeling close to someone miles away or disconnected from an event happening next door. Social distance doesn’t always align with physical space or time. Our study dives into such paradoxes: How do dimensions of distance—spatial, temporal, and social—shape our thoughts and memories?

1/ 🚨 Out in JPSP, "Thinking in 3D: A Multidimensional Mapping of the Effects of Distance on Abstraction" asks:

How robust is the evidence for Construal Level Theory (CLT)?
Are spatial, temporal, and social distances equally influential?
How do these dimensions of distance interact? 1/n

Multivariate Bayesian analysis revealed confirmed that that most of the DMN is utilized in both imagination and memory; the left ventral Precuneus displayed different patterns for imagination and memory of the same event.

Participants first read and imagined sentences describing different stages of their upcoming experience. After the jump, they revisited these sentences—but this time, recalling their real experiences during each part.

We scanned participants before and after they skydive for the first time. This design captures brain activity tied to both imagination and memory around a truly novel, real-world experience.

Past research often asked people to imagine future events that they have done before, which could have inflated estimates of similarity, so we wanted participants to imagine things they really haven't done before: jump off a plane.

We wanted to use state-of-the-art methods to examine the degree to which patterns of neural activity are similar in imagination and memory.

Past research has shown that the default mode network supports both memory and imagination. If this is the case, how do we differentiate between the two?

🚨Thrilled to share our new study, led By Dr. Inon Raz, in Cerebral Cortex🚨: "The Future, Before, and After".
The ability to imagine things we haven’t done before is one of the hallmarks of human cognition. How do we do it?