The specific design of stop‐signal and go/no‐go tasks differs across studies.

The most critical component in designing an inhibitory control task is to ensure that motor activity is elicited on each trial, so that no‐go/stop trials truly test inhibitory control.

If this is not the case, the task will not test the ability to withhold a response tendency, but will instead contrast conditions in which a response is made (go trials)



with conditions in which no response is ever initiated (no‐go/stop trials).


 In SSTs, prepotent motor activity is ensured by introducing a delay between go and stop stimulus. In the go/no‐go task, researchers attempt to elicit prepotent motor activity by varying two parameters. First, the relative proportion of go and no‐go trials is varied so that no‐go trials are less frequent.


Increasing the relative likelihood of go trials makes it strategically beneficial to initiate a go response on every trial, thereby introducing a prepotent tendency to respond (Menon, Adleman, White, Glover, & Reiss, 2001).

Second, trials are presented at rapid pace, so that responses will have to be made quickly, which has also been proposed to increase the prepotency of the go response (Garavan, Ross, & Stein, 1999).


 However, despite these well‐known considerations, an analysis of the go/no‐go literature reveals that the most commonly used configuration of the go/no‐go task uses equiprobable go and no‐go trials (Figure 1); in total, about 40% of published experiments used equiprobable go/no‐go stimuli.


Additionally, while most studies present stimuli at relatively rapid pace, almost 20% of studies use maximum trial durations greater than 4 s.


Importantly, it is not clear whether prepotent motor activity is elicited when go and no‐go trials are equiprobable and/or are presented at a slow pace.


While these considerations have often been mentioned in the literature, the evident pervasiveness of equiprobable, slow‐paced designs clearly indicates a crucial need for systematic investigation.