Neural correlates of the enactment effect in the brain

A better recall for subject-performed actions compared to similar action phrases encoded verbally is a well known phenomenon (e.g. Knopf & Neidhardt, 1989). There is an ongoing discussion about the basis of this so called enactment effect. Recent fMRI studies encour-aged theories which assume other mechanisms than just a motor modality effect. In the Russ et al. study (2004) brain activity for recognition of subject-performed vs. verbally en-coded action events was located in the gyrus supramarginalis, a structure that is involved in gesture production and related coding processes. The findings we want to present of two recent studies point to a structure nearby (gyrus angularis). Additionally, when com-paring target recognition to distractor rejection we consistently found activation in temporal brain areas that are not currently known to be related to episodic memory so long.