You’re scrolling online and spot a bottle of margarita mix. Before you can name why, your mind drifts back to a cruise vacation, the feel of the pool deck, the taste of a drink your friend ordered. A moment later, you’re picturing yourself mixing that same drink at a party this weekend. By the time you close the tab, you’ve mentally added it to your grocery list.
That kind of mental hopscotch across time may sound like idle daydreaming, but a new investigation published in Psychology & Marketing suggests it can quietly steer real purchase decisions when triggered by everyday digital product images and ads.
A cognitive quirk marketers have mostly ignored
Cognitive scientists call this ability “mental time travel.” It refers to the human capacity to mentally project oneself backward to relive a past experience or forward to pre-experience an imagined future one, complete with sights, sounds, and feelings. Researchers estimate people spend up to half their day doing this in some form.
Despite how common it is, marketing scholars have paid little attention to how brands might tap into it. Jennifer Brannon Barhorst of the College of Charleston, along with Nina Krey of Rowan University, Graeme McLean of the University of St Andrews, and Heiner Evanschitzky of the University of Manchester, set out to test whether digital product displays, the images and interactive product views that fill search results, banner ads, and e-commerce pages, can trigger this mental drifting and whether it changes what shoppers do next.
The team focused on three specific outcomes marketers care about: inspiration to purchase, intention to book a service, and willingness to pay a higher price. Each is tied to product categories with notoriously low online conversion rates. Cruise bookings convert at roughly 0.2 percent of clicks, snack foods around 1.4 percent, and wine as low as 0.5 percent.
Three products, three studies
The researchers ran three separate online experiments, each pairing a different type of product with a different purchase outcome.
In the first study, 284 U.S. participants viewed a digital product display for snack chips, either a static image or a 360-degree interactive version. Afterward, they answered survey questions about whether they had mentally traveled to past snacking moments, whether they had imagined future ones, and how inspired they felt to buy the product.
The second study used the same setup with 249 participants but swapped in a cruise ship display, a high-involvement purchase people typically research before booking. Here, the outcome of interest was intention to book the cruise.
The third study involved 149 participants viewing a wine display that included a stylized bottle, symbolic imagery, and a short fictional narrative describing the wine’s sensory qualities. The outcome measured was willingness to pay. Participants also answered questions about how often they read fiction in their everyday lives.
Across all three studies, the researchers used a statistical technique called structural equation modeling to trace how mental time travel to the past was linked to mental time travel to the future, and how both were linked to the purchase-related outcome.
What the data showed
A consistent pattern emerged. In each study, when the display prompted participants to mentally revisit a past experience, that recollection was linked to a stronger tendency to mentally pre-experience a future moment involving the product. And that forward-looking simulation, in turn, was linked to higher scores on the purchase outcome being measured.
For the snack chip display, participants who reported vivid future mental time travel also reported higher inspiration to purchase. For the cruise, future mental time travel was linked to higher booking intentions. For the wine, it was linked to a greater willingness to pay a premium price. In statistical terms, the effects were large, and the model explained roughly half the variation in each outcome.
The researchers also tested whether immersion, meaning how sensory-rich the display felt, changed the picture. They compared static images against 360-degree interactive versions, which participants rated as significantly more immersive. Despite that difference, the relationships between mental time travel and the purchase outcomes were nearly identical across formats. Fancier, more immersive presentations did not amplify the effect.
The authors interpret this null result as informative rather than disappointing. They suggest that future mental time travel is itself a cognitively demanding process that may occupy attention regardless of how sensory-rich the surrounding stimulus is.
The fiction reader effect
The wine study added one more twist. The researchers wanted to know whether people who habitually read fiction would respond differently to a narrative-style product display. Their reasoning drew on neuroscience research suggesting that reading fiction activates the same brain network involved in imagining the future, and that repeated cognitive activities can strengthen the neural pathways that support them.
The data supported this idea. Among participants who reported regularly reading fiction in their free time, the link between future mental time travel and willingness to pay was stronger than among those who did not. The authors interpret this as evidence that habitual fiction engagement may sharpen the mental machinery used to vividly imagine future consumption experiences, which then feeds into how much a person is willing to pay.
What this could mean for marketers
The authors argue their findings point to some concrete design choices for digital displays. Rather than pouring resources into ever-more-immersive technology, they suggest brands focus on cues that prompt customers to recall specific personal memories, familiar usage moments, sensory references, everyday scenes, that can then serve as raw material for imagining future use of the product.
They also suggest that narrative and storytelling elements may be particularly effective for audiences accustomed to processing fiction, and that this kind of audience targeting is increasingly feasible in digital environments.
Caveats worth noting
A few limitations temper the findings. All three studies relied on self-reported survey data collected at a single point in time from U.S. participants. The researchers infer cognitive and neural mechanisms from existing neuroscience literature but did not directly measure brain activity. The studies also cover only three product categories, so it remains an open question whether the same patterns hold for services, durable goods, or purchases in other cultural contexts.
The authors also note that habitual fiction engagement was tested as a proof-of-concept moderator rather than a comprehensive boundary condition. Other individual differences, such as mental imagery ability, nostalgia proneness, or cultural background, may shape how mental time travel plays out in ways this research did not examine.
