Navigating Unconscious Semantic Processing Through Hand Motion: A Mouse-Cursor Tracking Study

Research into unconscious cognitive processing has uncovered that subliminal exposure to stimuli can activate semantically related pairs across different domains. We revisit Van Opstal and Rooyakkers' (2022) same-different task by employing motion-based mouse-cursor tracking to investigate conditions that facilitate this phenomenon. Our research demonstrates that, under a reduced trial setting (80 trials), subliminal semantic priming occurs only in the no-cross-domain condition (e.g., prime and target are both numbers). When trials were increased to 480, we observed congruency effects in the cross-domain condition (prime and target derived from different categories, letters and numbers), suggesting that unconscious semantic processing is highly context-dependent and temporally sensitive. Our findings indicate that mouse-cursor tracking methods offer a bigger window into subliminal processing by examining how we perceive things outside of our awareness and how unconscious processing is connected to our bodies that is communicated in motion.