Go/No-GoGo/No-Go test

The Go/No-Go test is one of the simplest tasks in psychology: press a button as fast as you can on the “go” signal and hold back on the “no-go” one. But the trap is in that simplicity: when most signals are “go”, the hand gets used to pressing and presses even when it shouldn’t.

The test shows how well a person can stop an action that is already prepared. Psychologists call this inhibitory control, and we need it everywhere — from traffic to conversations where we are tempted to interrupt.

In BB Gym, Go/No-Go is a trainer with three levels. First comes “Reaction” with green circles only, then the main Go/No-Go part, and at the Elite level the “Reversed” part, where the signals swap roles. Each part starts with a warm-up, and the result shows a score and a skill profile.

Where the test came from

The idea dates back to 1868. The Dutch physiologist Franciscus Donders measured how long a thought takes and compared several kinds of reaction: a simple reaction to one signal, a choice between several responses, and a reaction to only one of several signals. That last kind is essentially Go/No-Go.

Donders subtracted the simple reaction time from that of a harder task to estimate how long recognition and decision take. This “subtraction method” became a foundation of experimental psychology, and the task with a single “go” signal has survived to this day.

Today Go/No-Go is one of the most common ways to study action inhibition in children and adults, including with brain imaging.

How it works

Signals come one at a time. Most of them are “go” — usually 75–80 % — and the rest are “no-go”. Because of this ratio, pressing becomes a habit, and every time a “no-go” signal appears that habit has to be stopped.

Each signal has a limited time. Not pressing a “go” signal in time is a miss. Pressing a “no-go” signal is an extra press. Time is measured from the moment the signal appears to the press, in milliseconds.

The signals are kept as simple as possible — coloured circles, letters or figures — so that the test checks inhibition itself, not reading or memory.

What the results show

The main measure is extra presses: the share of “no-go” signals on which the person could not hold back. They are treated as a measure of impulsivity. Missed “go” signals point rather to inattention or fatigue.

Reaction time matters too, and so does how even it is. A large spread of times, the coefficient of variation (CV), often reflects brief lapses of attention. Another measure is d′ from signal detection theory: it shows how well the signals are told apart, regardless of a tendency to press more often.

It is also interesting to see what happens after a mistake: many people slow down a little on the next signal. A 2014 meta-analysis found more extra presses on the Go/No-Go test in a number of groups with different mental disorders, so the test does not point to any single diagnosis.

Versions of the test

The classic version has frequent “go” and rare “no-go” signals. There is also a reversed one: in 1997 British researchers proposed the SART, where you press for almost everything and hold back only on the rare digit 3. It catches the moments when attention “switches off” and a person acts on autopilot.

A close relative is the stop-signal task: there an action has to be cancelled after it has already begun. That is a somewhat different kind of inhibition, so it is studied separately.

A 2008 meta-analysis of brain-imaging studies showed that the brain areas active during Go/No-Go depend on the version of the task: the harder the rule, the more the frontal cortex is involved. BB Gym has a “Reversed” part, where the rule flips, so the habit you have just built gets in the way.

What the trainer works on

The trainer loads inhibitory control, sustained attention and reaction speed. “Reaction” shows your baseline speed, Go/No-Go your ability to hold back, and “Reversed” adds cognitive flexibility.

Results improve quickly with practice, because people get used to the task. But to be honest: there is little evidence so far that such exercises make people less impulsive in everyday life. A large 2016 review of brain-training research found that people mostly get better at the very tasks they practise.

So it is best to treat Go/No-Go as a short warm-up for attention and self-control, and as a way to track how sharp you are on different days.

How to play and what to watch for

Don’t hold your finger over the button tensed “on your marks”. Look at the centre of the screen and give yourself a moment to see the colour.

Don’t chase speed at the cost of extra presses: the score combines speed and accuracy, and pressing a “no-go” signal costs more than a few extra milliseconds.

The pause between signals is random, so guessing the rhythm won’t work. A press faster than 150 ms counts as a guess, not a reaction.

Screen and lab: about norms

Laboratory and clinical versions of Go/No-Go have their own signals, ratios, timing and number of trials, and their norms are tied to exactly those. So results in BB Gym cannot be compared directly with published norms. Compare them only between your own attempts.

Results in BB Gym are not a medical diagnosis or a neuropsychological assessment. If you are concerned about attention, impulsivity or reaction speed, please see a specialist.

References

1. Donders F. C. (1969). On the speed of mental processes. Acta Psychologica, 30, 412–431 (translation of the 1868 paper)
2. Robertson I. H. et al. (1997). ‘Oops!’: performance correlates of everyday attentional failures in traumatic brain injured and normal subjects. Neuropsychologia, 35(6), 747–758
3. Simmonds D. J., Pekar J. J., Mostofsky S. H. (2008). Meta-analysis of Go/No-go tasks demonstrating that fMRI activation associated with response inhibition is task-dependent. Neuropsychologia, 46(1), 224–232
4. Verbruggen F., Logan G. D. (2008). Response inhibition in the stop-signal paradigm. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12(11), 418–424
5. Wright L. et al. (2014). Response inhibition and psychopathology: a meta-analysis of go/no-go task performance. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 123(2), 429–439
6. Simons D. J. et al. (2016). Do "brain-training" programs work? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 17(3), 103–186
7. Go/no-go — Wikipedia