Memory loves company: Related object pairs benefit working memory

Working memory is capacity-limited, yet performance improves when items can be organized into meaningful units for both auditory and visual forms. The present study examined whether functionally related visual object pairs benefit working memory and whether people's judgments of relatedness can predict memory outcomes. We developed a stimulus set of 160 line drawings arranged into 80 related and 80 unrelated pairs. Participants viewed four object pairs and then identified a novel object in a probe display. Accuracy was higher for related than unrelated pairs, demonstrating a memory advantage with strong split-half reliability. This finding was replicated in a version of the task where the probe display consisted of pairs rather than single objects. To validate our relatedness manipulation, we collected Likert ratings of both semantic relatedness and action compatibility. These measures were strongly correlated with each other and with the relatedness benefit observed in the memory experiments, providing further support for our manipulation. However, when related and unrelated sets were analyzed separately, subjective relatedness ratings did not predict variability in memory performance, a pattern that replicated in a follow-up ratings study. Cross-condition correlations revealed stable rank-order differences in memorability among individual objects that generalized across pairing conditions. Because the stimuli were meaningful objects, performance benefits may reflect conceptual structure and other nonvisual coding rather than purely visual storage mechanism. In summary, we show that functional pairing enhances working memory accuracy-which is consistent with ideas of chunking-while finer differences in memorability cannot be fully attributed to perceived relatedness. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).