You're just about to put your hand on the hob of your electric cooker, when you remember that it was on full blast until five minutes ago, and will still be scalding hot. You try to stop yourself - but will you succeed? This kind of 'stop!' scenario is the subject of some most interesting work by Ann Arbor neuroscientists Robert Schmidt and colleagues: Canceling actions involves a race between basal ganglia pathways Stop intentions may or may not succeed. Psychologists study these using 'stop-signal' tasks in which, for example, you must press a button whenever you hear a 'go' signal, unless it is followed by a 'stop' signal.
Stop-signal task performance is well described by theoretical models in which the Go and Stop cues respectively initiate stochastic go and stop processes that race for completion. The outcome of this race condition determines whether stopping is successful.
Until now however, ...
