Go/no-go test
Tap on the green circles, never on the red ones. The test counts your commission errors, taps on red, whose test retest reliability is 0.76 (Hedge et al., 2018).
Tap on green, never on red.
Forty circles flash one after the other, three in four are green. Tap the green ones fast, hold back on the red ones.
Space bar works too
How the test works
Forty circles appear one after the other, each for 350 ms with a short blank in between. Three in four are green, so tapping becomes a habit, and that is the point. When a red ring appears you must not tap. There are never more than two reds in a row.
Your score goes from 0 to 100. A tap on red, a commission error, weighs 70% of it. A missed green, an omission, weighs 30%. The detail under your score shows both counts. Space bar works too.
What a commission error measures
Tapping on green over and over builds a ready movement. A commission error is that movement escaping when you should have stopped it. Psychologists call the ability to stop it response inhibition.
In a test retest study of seven classic tasks, go/no-go commission errors reached a reliability of 0.76, one of the best of the set (Hedge et al., 2018). On personal phones, an impulse control task of the same family reached 0.68 for times and 0.80 for its composite score over three weekly sessions (Van Patten et al., 2021). This is why go/no-go is the only focus task that counts in the Headgame card.
Where it comes from
In 1868 Franciscus Donders measured several kinds of reaction. In his c reaction, the person answers one stimulus and ignores another, the ancestor of go/no-go (Donders, 1868). Today the task is widely used in brain imaging. A meta-analysis of these studies found activation in a frontal area called the pre-SMA in both simple and complex versions of the task (Simmonds et al., 2008).
Is there a norm?
Not for this exact format. Published norms depend heavily on the speed of the signals, the share of red and the population, so borrowing one would mislead you. No percentile is shown. Headgame is building its own norm from anonymous games and will publish it with its sample size.
Questions
Does the go/no-go test diagnose ADHD?
No. Go/no-go tasks are used in attention research, but a 20 second online game cannot diagnose anything. A diagnosis needs a clinical assessment by a professional.
What is a good score?
No red tapped and no green missed gives 100. Most people make a few errors on red, because the green rhythm pulls the finger. Watch your commission count from game to game rather than one score.
What this test does not tell you
It measures how well you hold back a tap in this game, on this device, today. It does not measure impulsivity in daily life, intelligence or any attention disorder.
There is no public norm for this format yet, so compare yourself with your own games.
Sources
- Hedge C., Powell G., Sumner P. (2018). The reliability paradox. Behavior Research Methods 50(3), 1166 to 1186. PMC5990556. doi.org/10.3758/s13428-017-0935-1
- Van Patten R., Iverson G.L., Muzeau M.A., VanRavenhorst-Bell H.A. (2021). Test-retest reliability and reliable change estimates for four mobile cognitive tests administered virtually in community-dwelling adults. Frontiers in Psychology 12, 734947. PMC8566921. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.734947
- Donders F.C. (1868, translated 1969). On the speed of mental processes. Acta Psychologica 30, 412 to 431. doi.org/10.1016/0001-6918(69)90065-1
- Simmonds D.J., Pekar J.J., Mostofsky S.H. (2008). Meta-analysis of Go/No-go tasks. Neuropsychologia 46(1), 224 to 232. doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2007.07.015
Other tests
Go/no-go, tap green, never red
Guides on this test
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