[3] In their study, Engelkamp and Krumnacker (1980) gave participants verbal phrases like “brush the teeth” or "shuffle the cards".
The self-performed task led to the best results, supporting the claim that the enactment effect exists.
Studies supported this claim in showing that abstract words were better remembered when a gesture was used while encoding.
It was shown that not mere physical motor information leads to the enactment effect, but that the semantic content of the gesture plays a role as well.
[7] Event-related potentials showed that enactment leads to deeper processing of new information, eliciting the assumption that by using gestures, the meaning of the new word is connected with an already existing concept in one's native language.