Neurological evidence for the role of construal level in future-directed thought

Abstract

The ability to mentally represent future events is a significant human psychological achievement. A challenge that people encounter is that they often lack detailed specifics about distant relative to near future events. Construal level theory proposes that people represent distant future events by their abstract and essential features—a process referred to as high-level construal. As events become temporally proximal, people represent events by their increasingly available and reliable concrete and idiosyncratic features—a process referred to as low-level construal. The present fMRI experiment provides direct neural evidence for these assertions. Using the why–how localizer as a measure of construal level, results revealed brain regions associated with both temporal distance and high-level construal (medial prefrontal cortex), as well as temporal proximity and low-level construal (precuneus). We discuss the implications of these findings for the neuroscience of mental time travel and cognitive representation.

Examining consumers’ sensory experiences with color: A consumer neuroscience approach

“…We note that the manipulations and data of the construal level and temporal distance tasks have been previously reported in Stillman et al (2017) That paper reported the results based on these two tasks, showing that visualizing the distant (vs. near) future recruited overlapping regions as high‐ (vs. low‐) level construal, and thus providing the first neurological evidence for the distance‐construal link. The present paper thus includes a reanalysis of these previously published data in addition to color of imagery data (which were not previously reported) to provide the first neurological evidence for distinguishing BW versus color imagery, and their relationships with temporal distance versus proximity and high‐level versus low‐level construal, respectively.…”

“…As described in Stillman et al (2017), both high‐level construal and distant future events activated regions in the mPFC and bilateral middle temporal gyrus, whereas low‐level construal and near‐future activated regions of the precuneus.…”

“…To test these hypotheses, we analyzed data that was collected (but not yet analyzed and published) from the same participants described extensively by Stillman et al (2017). This prior work found a two‐way neural overlap: overlapping neural regions involved in visualizing the distant future and high‐level construal, as well as overlapping neural regions involved in visualizing the near future and low‐level construal.…”

“…To compare activation of these contrast maps across task, we performed a number of conjunction analyses, which take the intersection of two contrast maps (contrast A ∩ contrast B), leaving only the voxels that are significantly active for both of the contrast maps. We then applied a voxel correction of 25 contiguous voxels to these resulting conjunction maps (Gilead et al, 2014; Stillman et al, 2017). We conducted all pairwise cross‐task conjunction analyses (e.g., far > near ∩ BW > color).…”

Building a story: coherent narrative formation relies on functional connectivity in posterior cortex and frontoparietal networks

“…One of the regions found in this network was the precuneus, showing higher positive functional connectivity with the seed region in its posterior part, and negative correlations in its superior part in the coherent compared to the incoherent narrative group. The precuneus plays an important role in high cognitive functions 42 and is involved in retrieval of past representations and in simulating future scenarios 43 as well as in meta-cognition 44 , all of which are critically required for coherent narrative construction. Its activation during the processing of a continuous story has previously been interpreted as being involved in the holistic representation of meaningful pieces of information 4546 and their segmentation 18,27,46 .…”