[The effect of set on human cognitive activity].

A psychological set was formed in 30 healthy adult subjects by means of successive exposition on the screen (with the intervals in 3-7 sec) of 30 single pseudo words written in the Latin letters. This series of stimuli was immediately followed by similar presentation of 36 single Russian words which consisted of the letters written in the same way as some characters of the Latin alphabet. At the beginning of the second train of stimuli all the subjects began to read the well-known Russian words as senseless. In 11 subjects this effect disappeared after 1-2 Russian word presentations and in 19 subjects only after 6-36 presentations. Analysis of the reaction time to the presentation of the visual probe stimulus suggests that the formation of preparatory set improves selective attention to the stimuli acting in a given situation and thus consolidates the cognitive processes.