Lu, XinyiZhu, Mona J.Risko, Evan F.2025-07-022025-07-022024http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00426-023-01889-7https://hdl.handle.net/10012/21938This version of the article has been accepted for publication, after peer review (when applicable) and is subject to Springer Nature’s AM terms of use, but is not the Version of Record and does not reflect post-acceptance improvements, or any corrections. The Version of Record is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00426-023-01889-7While memory for semantically related items is improved over unrelated items in many cases, relatedness can also lead to memory costs. Here we examined how the semantic relatedness of words within a display influenced memory for their locations. Participants learned the locations of words inside grid displays; the words in a given display were either from a single category or were from different assorted categories. When a display containing words from a single category was compared to a scrambled display containing words from multiple categories, location memory performance was rendered worse, while word recall performance was significantly improved. Our results suggest that semantically structured spaces can both help and harm memory within the context of a location memory task. We hypothesize that relatedness can improve memory performance by increasing the likelihood that matching candidates will be retrieved, yet might worsen performance that requires distinguishing between similar target representations.enAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/cognitionlong-term memoryepisodic memorylearning and memorymemory studiessemantic memoryArticle