The article addresses the issue of perception and processing of ambiguous information. Experimental effects of understanding of polysemantic stimuli (homonyms, reversed figures) on conscious and unconscious levels have been analyzed. It is shown that implicit awareness of several meanings occurs before the explication of one meaning of stimulus take place. The aim of the current research is to discover the effect of asymmetry of semantic activation in unconscious perception of ambiguous information (in homonyms). The  procedures  and  results  of  the  two  conducted  studies  are  fully  described. In Experiment 1, technique of priming was used, in which ambiguous words were used as prime stimuli. Participants were randomly divided into four groups (two experimental and two control groups). Unconscious primes with visual mask were demonstrated to participants of experimental groups. Then, two words were demonstrated, only one of which had semantic relation to one meaning of the prime stimulus. The sets of stimuli in the experimental groups differed only in the words that were semantically related to the meaning of the ambiguous prime. The words that were not semantically related to the prime stimuli were identical. Then all partici pants (including participants in control groups) were told to choose as quickly as they could one word of two, using keys “left” or “right”. The results supported the hypothesis about the asymmetry of semantic activation in general. Participants did choose words related to particular meaning of prime stimuli more often.In Experiment 2, participants were asked to write down associations with the same words that were used as primes in Experiment 1. The results have shown that stronger association between prime and ambiguous stimuli facilitates priming-effect, while weaker association makes priming-effect insignificant.The present research supports the proposition that all alternative meanings of ambiguous words are more or less actualized implicitly, which influences further cognitive activity. The described phenomenon was labeled as the effect of semantic activation asymmetry. On the unconscious level, this asymmetry shows up as quantitative difference between priming-effects. On the conscious level, this asymmetry shows up as easiness  and  accessibility  of  verbal associations  on  corresponding  meaning of the ambiguous word.

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The article is addressed on research aimed to discover effect of transfer of implicit knowledge of artificial grammar on sensorimotor tasks solving. Meaning of implicit knowledge in actual cognitive activity has been considered. 40 volunteers took part in experiment, ages 18 to 43 years. Participants of experiment implicit learned the rule of artificial grammar. The task of control phase was to solve the sensorimotor task — to react by pressing of certain key under appearance of green or yellow circle. In experimental group, always before presentation of green circle a grammatical sequence appeared, before presentation of yellow circle — ungrammatical. In control group, color of circle was not dependent on grammatically of sequence. The results have shown that significant reduction of reaction time was discovered in experimental group. Thus, transfer of implicitly learned knowledge of artificial grammar leads to increase of effectiveness of sensorimotor activity. Implicit knowledge acquired meaning prim-stimulation.

In this paper, we propose an approach to semantic differences detection in texts presented in the form of frequency dictionaries. The original text data has been obtained by collecting records on various online communities. We have implemented a specialized software module that allows us to analyze and download both posts and comments from the social network VK's open communities. To build our frequency dictionary, we have developed an algorithm that takes into account the peculiarities of the data collected from social networks. In the article, we propose an approach based on the use of methods reducing the dimension of feature spaces to identify keywords based on the analysis of their frequency of usage. The algorithm we present uses the principal component analysis technique. As a result, we have shown that by using the coefficients of the obtained linear transformation, it is possible to estimate the importance of words. With the help of these estimates, we were able to identify not only key words, but also semantic differences in social networks communities. The proposed approach can also be used to form metrics and calculate the social distance between Internet communities.

The article addresses the problem of unconscious gaining of abstract knowledge. Participants solved circular 5-letter anagram arranged by the same invariant scheme. The learned schematic invariant is not perceptive, contrary to the usual invariant acquisition technique in other studies. The possibility of implicit learning of a solution scheme is discussed. Efficiency of anagram solving is compared between the groups with constant or changed solution scheme during the test stage. The change of the solution scheme leads to a decrease of efficiency, i.e. to the lower number of the solved anagrams. The results support the possibility of gaining unconscious abstract knowledge concerning the scheme without any perceptual invariant component. Possible use of a similar stimulus material in studies of interaction between visual and verbal components of working memory is briefly discussed.