Abstract
<p>What organizing principles govern visual memory? Perceptual feature similarity and semantic relatedness have long been considered the primary candidates. Previous theoretical work, however, suggests that the similarity of actions used to interact with objects may constitute a more fundamental organizing principle. Here, we test whether similarity in learned action associations shapes the representational structure of visual memories. Across two experiments (N = 48 each), participants memorized the orientations of two bars and reproduced them by performing a cued action (grip or slide). Critically, across trials, stimulus-action mappings were stable for some stimulus pairs but varied randomly for oth-ers. We found that objects associated with different actions were remembered as more visually distinct, and this representational repulsion was amplified when action mappings were consistent and learned by participants. These findings indicate that stable action rela-tionships shape visual memory representations, supporting the view that similarity in action association constitutes a key organizing dimension of representational structure.</p>