The paper describes testing the hypothesis of increasing concretization of the consciously perceived meaning of ambiguous information in the presence of alternative meanings that remain unnoticed (i.e. «negatively chosen» meanings).

It is assumed that unconscious values play an important role in the process of interpreting ambiguous information: they limit the range of aspects of the consciously perceived meaning by dropping out those that are not related to this meaning. Concretization of the perceived object occurs by thinning the context of perception when rejecting less relevant alternatives, which this object is not. This eliminates the interference with the most suitable decision. In addition, it is the unconscious meaning that provides the constancy of the context. Specifically, the perceived object becomes subjectively less similar to other objects. We link this process with a narrowing of the associative field or the range of equivalence of the meaning of the perceived object. As a convenient model for studying ambiguous information, we consider double meaning figures. In the process of research the frequency of finding the semantic associations of words and figures is compared in three conditions: for unambiguous figures, for ambiguous figures with negatively chosen meanings, and also for ambiguous figures with both meanings consciously perceived by а participant. The results of the experiment show that the condition of unnoticed ambiguity differs from other conditions, both in terms of the number of errors in the omission of semantic associations, and in the ability to notice these errors. Thus, it is shown that the presence of negatively chosen alternatives is a factor contributing to the concretization of a consciously perceived meaning by narrowing its equivalence range. The conclusion is made that the essence is given not so much by conscious meaning, as by negatively chosen ones.