Psychological research indicates that spatial factors can fundamentally impact human cognition, as demonstrated by the role of spatial reference frames in object recognition and memory, and the grounding of abstract concepts like time or number in spatial dimensions through metaphorical mapping. In the present work, I will focus on another spatial factor that may systematically influence how individuals process and organize information, thereby affecting both the content and structure of thought: distance. For instance, theoretical frameworks such as Construal Level Theory (CLT; Trope & Liberman, 2010) suggest that as the distance to an object or event increases, individuals tend to adopt higher-level construals, emphasizing abstract, amodal, and decontextualized features and overarching goals, rather than specific, concrete, and modal details. Conversely, proximal spatial contexts promote more concrete thinking, heightening attention to immediate, specific details and situational constraints. In this talk, I will review evidence supporting this hypothesis from language comprehension research, and present novel findings from a pre-registered series of experiments investigating whether spatial distance also influences non-linguistic object recognition. Specifically, these experiments test whether the automatic activation of specific, modal object features diminishes with increasing distance, as predicted by CLT. I will discuss these results in light of the idea that the abstractness of cognitive representations is fundamentally flexible (Kaup et al., 2024), allowing for adaptation to situational demands and affordances that are (at least in part) shaped by spatial distance.