Attention & control Donders, 1868

Go / No-Go task

Press fast for green, hold back for red. Because green comes up most of the time, stopping on red is harder than it sounds.

Measures: Response inhibition
Template length: about 4 minutes (50 trials)

A circle appears. If it is green you press the spacebar as quickly as you can; if it is red you do nothing. Three out of four circles are green, so pressing becomes a habit and the occasional red one catches you out.

Pressing on a red circle is a commission error. How often that happens is the main measure of how well someone can hold back a response that is already prepared.

Try it yourself

A shortened run of the same template researchers use. Nothing is recorded and you do not need an account.

How the task works

1A fixation cross appears for 500 ms.
2A green or red circle appears for 1 second. Press the spacebar for green only.
375% of trials are Go (green) and 25% are No-Go (red).

What people usually find

Most people miss very few green circles but press on some red ones. Commission errors go up as Go trials become more frequent and as the response window gets shorter, because both make pressing more automatic.

How to score it

Commission error rate: proportion of No-Go trials with a press.
Omission error rate: proportion of Go trials without a press.
Mean Go RT. Faster Go responding usually comes with more commission errors, so report the two together.

Before you run it

The inhibition demand comes from Go trials being frequent. A 50/50 version measures choice more than inhibition.
With only 12 or so No-Go trials in the template, commission rates move in steps of about 8%. Use at least 40 No-Go trials for individual differences.

Run it as a study

Use the template as it is

The demo above is the same code as the Go / No-Go template in the gallery. Add it to a project, change the settings in config.js, publish it and share the link. Reaction times and responses come back to your dashboard.

Create a free account to use it

Or build a variant: vary how frequent the go trials are

Paste this into the AI panel in the experiment editor. Read the code it writes before you collect anything.

Build a go/no-go task in two blocks of 100 trials. In one block 50% of trials are Go, in the other 80% are Go; counterbalance block order across participants using random assignment. Go is a green circle, No-Go a red circle, shown for 500 ms with a 1000 ms response window and the spacebar to respond. Record the block, the Go proportion, the stimulus type and whether the response was correct.

Common questions

What does the go/no-go task measure?

Response inhibition: the ability to stop an action that has become habitual. It is used in research on impulsivity, ADHD, addiction and ageing.

What is the difference between go/no-go and the stop-signal task?

In go/no-go you know from the stimulus whether to respond, so you inhibit before starting. In the stop-signal task the stop cue arrives after the response is already under way, so you have to cancel it.

How many No-Go trials do I need?

For group comparisons a few dozen per condition is common. For individual differences aim for 40 or more, since error rates on few trials are coarse.