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It makes sense to have your mental models use more detail when what they model is closer to you in space and time, and closer to you in your social world; such things tend to be more important to you.  It also makes sense to use more detail for real events over hypothetical ones, for high over low probability events, for trend deviations over trend following, and for thinking about how to do something over why to do it.  So it makes sense to use detail thinking for "near", and sparse thinking for "far", in these ways. 

It can make sense to have specialized mental systems for these different approaches, i.e., systems best at reasoning from detailed representations, versus systems best at reasoning from sparse abstractions.  When something became important enough to think about at all you would first use sparse systems, graduating to detail systems when that thing became important enough to justify the added resources.  Even then you might continue to reason about it using sparse systems, at least if you could sufficiently coordinate the two kinds of systems.