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

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.