Press on green, hold on red — the standard laboratory measure of response inhibition
Go/No-Go is the standard laboratory test of response inhibition. Green means press; red means do not. Because green appears far more often, pressing becomes the habit — and then a red appears and you have to stop a movement that has already started. The interesting number is not your speed, it is your false alarm count.
Press as fast as you can when you see the GO signal.
Withhold your response entirely on a NO-GO signal.
GO trials are far more frequent, which builds the pressing habit.
Both your reaction time and your false alarms are recorded.
The summary separates hits, misses and false alarms.
Choose a block of 40, 80 or 120 trials and how often go appears (70%, 80% or 90%). Between trials there is a random 0.45 to 0.8 second gap; the signal then stays up for a fixed window.
At the end you get your hits (go trials you responded to, as a percentage), false alarms (no-go trials you responded to, as a percentage) and your median reaction time on hits. A higher go percentage makes the no-go trials harder to stop on.
Response inhibition — the ability to cancel an action already in motion. It is a core component of executive control and it is measurably worse when you are tired, and reliably worse in people who are going faster than they should. Another focus game to try next: Emotion Match.
The go/no-go task measures response inhibition: respond quickly to frequent 'go' signals and withhold on rare 'no-go' ones. Because go is so common, responding becomes a habit, and stopping requires active control. The design goes back to Donders' nineteenth-century experiments on the speed of mental processes.
Brain-imaging research links this kind of stopping to a network including the right inferior frontal cortex. Two numbers matter: commission errors (responding on no-go) measure how well you stop, and reaction time on go trials shows how much speed you gave up to do it.
Deliberately slow down. Every millisecond of reaction time you save costs you inhibition accuracy — that trade-off is the whole task.
Do not rest your finger on the button. Contact primes the press.
Wait for colour, not for movement. Reacting to 'something appeared' guarantees false alarms.
Watch your false alarm count, not your speed. A fast run with three false alarms is a worse result than a slower clean one.
Pressing on a NO-GO trial. It is the error the task exists to measure.
To build a prepotent response. Inhibition is only interesting when there is something to inhibit.
Go/No-Go variants appear in research on attention and impulsivity, but a web version is not a diagnostic tool and no score here means anything clinically.
Accurate. The task is designed so that pure speed produces a bad result.