NEATLabs Paradigm: Go/No-Go & Go/Wait — Action, Inhibition, Impulsivity

The Question: When Does the Brain Choose Not to Act?

Behavioral inhibition — the ability to withhold or delay a prepotent action — is central to impulsivity, and its failure shows up across ADHD, addiction, and mood disorders. At NEATLabs this was studied with Go/No-Go and Go/Wait paradigms in rats, where the whole experiment turns on the difference between acting and not acting.

Study Design and Rat Behavior

The paradigms make a clean behavioral dissociation. On Go trials the rat should emit a response to earn reward; on No-Go trials it should withhold that same response; on Go/Wait trials it must delay responding until a wait interval elapses. The behavior the design elucidates is precise:

• Correct Go — the animal detects the cue and acts.
• Correct No-Go / successful wait — the animal suppresses or postpones a response it is primed to make.
• Premature responses — a direct behavioral readout of impulsivity: the rat cannot hold the action back.
• Omissions — failures of engagement or detection.

Turning those events into reliable, millisecond-aligned computational markers — cues, waits, premature responses, omissions, rewards — was the systems problem I owned, because the neural analysis is only as good as the behavioral timestamps feeding it.

Methodology

• Recording: large-scale multisite local field potential recordings across distributed cortico-striatal and limbic sites in behaving rats, using the lab's chronic multi-site probe designs.
• Cross-species bridge: an analogous human EEG version of the task, so rodent network findings could be compared against human electrophysiology.
• Analysis: event-aligned time-frequency decomposition and functional connectivity analysis to move from single-site power to network-level coupling between action and inhibition regions.

What We Found

The eNeuro paper mapped large-scale networks associated with action, behavioral inhibition, and impulsivity:

• Low-frequency activity was linked with action and sensory-driven responses.
• Theta activity in prefrontal and premotor regions was linked with inhibition — the signature of withholding a response.
• Connectivity between motor cortex and inhibitory regions related to diminished impulsivity: stronger coupling, better control.

A companion study on the rodent default-mode network used the same large-scale LFP approach and found a shared alpha/low-beta suppression pattern during task engagement in both rats and humans — further evidence that these distributed dynamics translate across species.

Publications

• Mapping Large-Scale Networks Associated with Action, Behavioral Inhibition and Impulsivity — eNeuro (2021)
• Electrophysiological Correlates of Rodent Default-Mode Network Suppression — Cerebral Cortex Communications (2021)

This paradigm is one thread of the broader NEATLabs research program.