The article considers the heuristic possibilities of using psycholinguistic dictionaries (associative and associative-semantic) for modeling fragments of the linguistic consciousness of certain groups (sociocultural communities) of native speakers, and builds a “three-dimensional” model of the subjective semantics of individual stimuli in a comparative slice and trend modes. The authors characterize the main associative dictionaries created on the basis of the results of all-Russian and regional experiments, show the possibilities of “large” and “small” psycholinguistic dictionaries in the aspect of modern scientific research. The implementation of the heuristic potential of regional dictionaries is shown on the example of comparative slice and trend descriptions of the semantics of the stimulus “life”. Associative fields from the “Associative Dictionary of a Teenager” (composed in 2002), the new associative base of this dictionary made up in 2021, associative and semantic experiments conducted by the authors in Omsk in 2010 – 2012 and in 2022 are used as material for such descriptions. To analyze the composition of the fields, it was important to analyze the stable and mobile zones of the subjective semantics of the stimulus, the verbal expression of the semantic areas associated with the stimulus, the behavior of frequency reactions of the respondents of different age and social groups, the prevalence of nonstandard (slang, colloquial) and foreign language reactions.