Measuring response times has been a staple for evaluating masked semantic priming. Its efficacy, however, has been challenged on several grounds — reported effect sizes of these studies are relatively small, and priming effects pertaining to response time measures are difficult to be replicated. Here, we report a complementary method — recording trajectories of a computer cursor. Participants judged whether two digits were the same or different, preceded by a briefly presented masked prime. Each prime had either positive or negative connotations, and the priming effects were evaluated either by response times or cursor trajectories associated with the area under the curve. Results indicate that the effect size of the congruency effect measured by cursor trajectories (i.e. area under the curve) was far greater than that measured by response times, suggesting that the cursor trajectory measure is more sensitive to masked semantic priming than the response time measure

Choice reaching, e.g., reaching a targeted object by hand, involves a dynamic online integration of perception, action and cognition, where neural activities of prefrontal cortical regions are concurrently coordinated with sensori-motor subsystems. On the basis of this theoretical development, the authors investigate the extent to which cursor movements in a simple choice-reaching task reveal people’s emotions, such as anxiety. The results show that there is a strong correlation between cursor trajectory patterns and self-reported anxiety in male participants. Because computer cursors are ubiquitous, our trajectory analysis can be augmented to existing affective computing technologies.