Everything you ever wanted to know about the Think/No-Think task, but forgot to ask

Abstract

The Think/No-Think (TNT) task has just celebrated 20 years since its inception, and its use has been growing as a tool to investigate the mechanisms underlying memory control and its neural underpinnings. Here, we present a theoretical and practical guide for designing, implementing, and running TNT studies. For this purpose, we provide a step-by-step description of the structure of the TNT task, methodological choices that can be made, parameters that can be chosen, instruments available, aspects to be aware of, systematic information about how to run a study and analyze the data. Importantly, we provide a TNT training package (as Supplementary Material), that is, a series of multimedia materials (e.g., tutorial videos, informative HTML pages, MATLAB code to run experiments, questionnaires, scoring sheets, etc.) to complement this method paper and facilitate a deeper understanding of the TNT task, its rationale, and how to set it up in practice. Given the recent discussion about the replication crisis in the behavioral sciences, we hope that this contribution will increase standardization, reliability, and replicability across laboratories.