Roadside billboards containing negative and positive emotional content have been shown to influence driving performance, however, the impact of highly arousing taboo information is unknown. Taboo information more reliably evokes emotional arousal and can lead to greater attentional capture due to its inherent 'shock value.' The objective of the present study was to examine driver distraction as...

This paper compares some of the most efficient heuristic methods for the quadratic assignment problem. These methods are known as strict taboo search, robust taboo search, reactive taboo search and genetic hybrids. It is shown that the efficiency of these methods strongly depends on the problem type and that no one method is better than all the others. A fast method for tuning the short term me...

When pronouncing novel/unknown words, readers often use prior experience with similar, neighbor words. Comparison to neighbors can be helpful for unknown or novel words (wug is like pug), but it can also lead to errors (pint is not like mint). We investigate whether pronunciation can be affected by top-down influences, specifically the perceived taboo-ness of a known neighbor. While orthographi...

Tetlock’s sacred value protection model (SVPM) proposed that taboo trade-offs evoke a strong moral reaction in people who resist secular encroachments on their sacred values. This strong moral reaction can be thought of as setting a moral limit on the extent of markets in society. In addition, Tetlock (2000) also suggested that a substantial minority of participants are susceptible to trading o...

Environmental sounds can be powerful alarm signals. Hence, attentional orienting towards their location might occur extremely rapidly. Here, we used the beep probe task to investigate attentional biases to negative, positive and taboo sounds. While both left-presented negative and taboo sounds elicited attentional avoidance, taboo but not negative sounds triggered Inhibition of Return. Moreover...

Individual differences in working memory (WM) predict principled variation in tasks of reasoning, response time, memory, and other abilities. Theoretically, a central function of WM is keeping task-relevant information easily accessible while suppressing irrelevant information. The present experiment was a novel study of mental control, using performance in the game Taboo as a measure. We teste...

The TOTEM (TOTal cross section, Elastic scattering and diffraction dissociation Measurement at the LHC) experiment, located interaction point 5 of LHC, has measured total, elastic inelastic proton-proton crosssections, using a luminosity independent method, based on optical theorem, in center-of-mass energy range from 2.76 to 13 TeV. was investigated wide squared four-momentum transfer |t| allo...