The skill of not pressing
Star means tap; anything else means hands off. Stopping a ready hand is harder than moving it.
Your hand prepares to act the moment anything appears.
Stopping is its own race: a stop signal chases the action already rolling.
Winning that race more often is inhibitory control, the everyday superpower.
Then and now
Stopping research matured from one clever task into a consensus-governed measurement standard used across psychiatry and neuroscience.
Logan, G. D. and Cowan, W. B. (1984)
Where it began“On the ability to inhibit thought and action: A theory of an act of control”
Psychological Review, 91, 295-327
Modelled stopping as a race between the action and a stop process, the standard account of response inhibition.
Verbruggen, F. and 24 co-authors (2019)
State of the art“A consensus guide to capturing the ability to inhibit actions and impulsive behaviors in the stop-signal task”
eLife, 8, e46323
A 25-author consensus standard for measuring stopping: the paradigm is so central that the field wrote itself a rulebook.
What we do and do not claim
Go and no-go rounds exercise stopping in the game. We report restraint honestly and promise nothing beyond it.