Attention tasks

Respond to circles and hold back for squares

Respond to circles and hold back for squares. Check missed signals, false presses and response time.

60 trials
1 min
Free, no sign-up

For the fairest comparison, retake on the same device.

Results on screen · no email

About this test

A go/no-go task asks for a fast response to a frequent stimulus and no response to a rare one. This page counts the circles you missed, the squares you pressed on by mistake, your median response time, and how that time changed across the first, second and last third of the run. Published go/no-go studies use different shares of no-go trials and different time limits, so this page gives no typical figure for its own format. In one test and retest study (Hedge and colleagues, 2018), the number of presses on no-go trials was one of the most consistent measures across sessions, so that count is the one to track across your own runs.

How the task works

A circle or a square flashes in the area.
Press Space or tap for a circle; do nothing for a square.
Squares are rarer, which is what makes holding back hard.
Sixty trials at a steady pace, a little over a minute.

Task accessibility

Time: 1 minute
Length: 60 trials
Result: your times and counts

Your answers stay in this browser tab. If you sign in, you can save your result (not your answers). When session replay is on, it can include visible questions, choices and results. Privacy details.

Where these figures come from

Hedge, Powell and Sumner (2018) gave a go/no-go task of 600 trials, 75% of them go trials, in two sessions three weeks apart; commission errors, presses on no-go trials, were among the most consistent measures in the study, with an intraclass correlation of .76 in both of their studies. Checked 3 November 2026

Use the result

What this test adds

Misses and false presses are two different kinds of error, one about staying engaged and one about stopping in time, and the page keeps them apart; the drift figure shows whether attention held for the whole run.

A small next step

If commissions were high, run again and let the first square pass deliberately slowly; if omissions were high, notice which third they clustered in.

Questions people ask

What does a go/no-go task measure?

Two things that pull against each other: answering a frequent signal quickly, and stopping yourself when the rare one appears. The frequent signal builds the habit of pressing, and the rare one asks you to break it.

Does taking it on a phone make my result worse?

A tap is slower than a key press, so your median will sit higher on a phone than on a laptop, and a slower response can miss the one-second window that a faster one caught. Compare phone runs with phone runs.

What do I do with the two error counts?

Read them separately, because they point in opposite directions: missed circles are about staying engaged, pressed squares are about stopping in time. If the pressed squares are high, run it again and deliberately let the first square go by slowly.

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