The central aim of the present study was to explore neural activity related to the anticipation of both reward and attentional demands (i.e., discrimination difficulty), and more specifically, the respective time course of such activity. The present results support the idea that these processes can be dissociated temporally during task preparation. In this preparation phase reward availability modulated the processing of the cue starting from 200 ms post cue onset, with larger P2 amplitudes for potential-reward trials compared to no-reward trials. In addition, the main effect of reward was prevalent in all later ERP components of the cueing phase. The impact of reward on the amplitude of later components of warning stimuli, particularly on the P3, has been shown in previous studies (Goldstein et al., 2006; Hughes, et al., 2012). In contrast, reports on how reward availability impacts the anticipatory CNV component are rather inconsistent. Some researchers have reported variable CNV amplitudes depending on the rewarding characteristics of the warning stimulus (Hughes et al., 2012; Pierson et al., 1987), which however others have failed to find (Goldstein et al., 2006;
