MANIFESTATION OF COGNITIVE UNCONSCIOUSNESS IN REMEMBERING AND RECOGNIZING INVERTED WORDS

Banshchikov Alexander Vitalievich

This paper touches on a wide range of topics from cognitive psychology: the priming effect, anagram solving, implicit learning, and many others, but it all comes together under the overarching scientific category of the "cognitive unconscious. Since the nineteenth century, with enviable regularity, more and more new facts of the existence of the unconscious mind have been discovered. The scientific description of unconscious processes significantly distinguishes cognitive psychology from the mythological constructs of psychoanalysis. The present paper analyzes research into the logic of how the cognitive unconscious works and, on the basis of the theoretical positions formed, hypothesizes that our psyche is capable of solving simple anagrams-inversions. Thus, an attempt is made to record a new psychological phenomenon. It is assumed that the cognitive unconscious will meaningfully distinguish inverted words from a meaningless set of letters, which, nevertheless, are formed according to similar formal rules as inversions. Subjects (N=60) are sequentially presented with a series of stimuli consisting of 9 inverted words and 9 pseudo-words at high speed. Subjects are then asked to recognize previously demonstrated (relevant) stimuli, to which 18 distractor stimuli are added during the demonstration. The distractors are also pseudo-words, but were not previously presented. We expected that respondents would recognize inverted words more frequently and more quickly than other types of stimuli. The findings were statistically processed using the Friedman criterion and the T-Wilcoxon test. The final result was subjected to a Bonferroni correction to exclude the possibility of chance results (artifacts) due to multiple comparisons. It turned out that respondents were very successful in identifying relevant words, and, as we expected, inversions were recognized more frequently, albeit statistically insignificantly. However, a significant result was obtained when comparing the average recognition rate: inverted words were recognized significantly faster than pseudo-words. According to the Bonferroni correction, this result is not only statistically significant, but also reliable. Thus, it is concluded that the cognitive unconscious is probably, for reasons not yet clear, able to perceive words written in reverse order.

Keywords:cognitive psychology, psychology of consciousness, cognitive unconscious, consciousness, unconscious, experimental psychology