2006; Hickey and van Zoest, 2012; Hickey et al., 2010). These early-stage effects are thought to rely on the direct association between task-relevant stimulus features and reward, and hence do not reflect preparatory or strategic effects that require a cue-target sequence. Baines et al. (2011), in turn, investigated the dynamics of spatial attention and motivation in an event-related-potentials (ERP) study, but also focused on effects of target processing. They showed that motivation and attention had early independent effects when visually processing the target stimulus, with interactions only arising later.
