Thanks to all of the great co-authors, Nachshon Meiran, Shaul Shvimmer, Liron Amihai, Yitzhak Yitzhaky, Jonathan Rosenblatt and to @mattansb.bsky.social for lots and lots of help on the statistical analyses

10/ 🎉 This work was led by Avi Gamoran with myself and Britt Hadar @britthadar.bsky.social co-PI'ing the project. Read the full paper here: doi.org/10.1037/pspa...

9/ 🌐 The additivity of distance shapes how we navigate a world where spatial and social distances increasingly diverge. In the paper, we discuss some implications this has to communication of distant risks, and to our understanding of everyday experience in the modern world.

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.

7/ 🔗 Result #2: CLT’s second premise also received support: Distancing events on one dimension (e.g., spatially) increased their perceived distance on other dimensions (e.g., temporally, socially).

6/ 🧠 To objectively measure the degree of distance in texts, we trained a neural network to classify narratives as close or far across spatial, temporal, and social dimensions. This classifier is available to other researchers and can be implemented with minimal coding experience.

5/ 📈 Result #1: As predicted by CLT, distance increased abstraction. All three dimensions affected abstraction, as shown by both measures: abstract language and episodic details.
This confirms that CLT stands on firm ground—a crucial finding given ongoing concerns about replicability in psychology.

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?

Read all about it here:
academic.oup.com/cercor/artic...

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?