Where was it? The impact of object nameability, surrounding context, and object placement on episodic object-location memory.

Remembering where an object is requires binding its identity and location into a coherent memory.Object-related and spatial factors have been studied separately, but how they interact in shaping objectlocation memory remains unclear.We investigated how object nameability, the presence of surrounding context, and the nature of object placements affect episodic memory for object locations.In Experiment 1, participants memorized easy-to-name and difficult-to-name objects presented at the top, bottom, left, or right of the screen.Surrounding context was varied by presenting the objects either individually or in groups of four.After a filler task, they were presented again centrally, and participants indicated each object's original location.Results revealed a substantial location-memory advantage for easily nameable objects.Surrounding context had no effect.In Experiment 2, we replicated these findings and additionally varied the objects' placements by presenting them either in a diamond array as in Experiment 1 or in a square array.Location memory was better for the former, but only for easily nameable objects.In Experiment 3, we manipulated the opportunity for verbalization with an articulatory suppression task, which reduced the memory advantage of easily nameable objects.We conclude that easily nameable objects profit from the ease of verbal encoding. Public Significance StatementWe show that the nameability and the placement of an object affect how well its location is remembered.Objects that are easy to name profit from additional verbal processing compared with objects that are difficult to name.This leads to a location-memory advantage for easily nameable objects, which is further enhanced if the object's location also has a simple label, thus enabling a verbal link between the object and its location.In contrast, the presence of surrounding objects did not improve location memory, pointing to limits in the use of contextual spatial cues.