Despite a large body of research concerning the effects of psychological distance, our understanding about how different dimensions of distance interact and influence cognition is still limited. In this study, we moved beyond first-order approximations of the effects of psychological distance, to map the effects of multidimensional events as they appear in the world. We developed a novel experimental idiographic paradigm in which participants were asked to generate narratives of events. We simultaneously manipulated the prompts to adjust the perceived proximity in three dimensions of psychological distance, according to what individuals consider to be close to (or far from) them. Additionally, we trained an algorithm to identify the distances depicted in these narratives. Consistent with construal level theory, the results of our large-sample, preregistered analyses revealed that an increase in distance, irrespective of its type, led to more abstract representations and that experimentally manipulating distance on one dimension led to increased distance on the other dimensions. This was true for both traditional measures of linguistic abstraction and memory semanticization measures that quantify the amount of episodic detail. Results show that the effect of distance on abstraction was consistent across its various dimensions, confirming a monotonic and additive (i.e., linear) relationship. This sheds light on the mechanisms whereby psychological distance affects our thought and paves the way for more refined, integrative models of how our minds construct possible futures and alternative realities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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3D 思考：距离对抽象影响的多维映射。


尽管有大量关于心理距离影响的研究，但我们对距离的不同维度如何相互作用和影响认知的理解仍然有限。在这项研究中，我们超越了心理距离影响的一阶近似，绘制了多维事件在世界上出现的影响。我们开发了一种新的实验惯用语范式，其中要求参与者生成事件的叙述。我们同时操纵提示，根据个人认为接近（或远离）他们的内容，在心理距离的三个维度上调整感知到的接近度。此外，我们还训练了一种算法来识别这些叙述中描绘的距离。与解释水平理论一致，我们的大样本、预注册分析的结果显示，距离的增加，无论其类型如何，都会导致更抽象的表示，而在一个维度上实验操纵距离会导致另一个维度上的距离增加。对于传统的语言抽象测量和量化情节细节数量的记忆语义化测量都是如此。结果表明，距离对抽象的影响在其各个维度上是一致的，证实了单调和加法（即线性）关系。这揭示了心理距离影响我们思想的机制，并为我们的思想如何构建可能的未来和替代现实的更精细、更综合的模型铺平了道路。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 （c） 2024 APA，保留所有权利）。