In recent years, a predominant electrophysiological task paradigm has been used to study reward processing, namely the “Gambling Paradigm” and the two ERP components that have been reported to occur during outcome processing are the negativity analogous to N2 (between 200–300 ms) and the positivity analogous to P3 (between 300–600 ms) as shown in Fig. 1 (Gehring and Willoughby, 2002; Luu et al., 2004; Nieuwenhuis et al., 2004, 2005b; Yeung and Sanfey, 2004; Cohen et al., 2007; Mennes et al., 2008; Kamarajan et al., 2009). While these components have been referred to by different names, we introduced and justified the terms ORN and ORP in our earlier works on outcome processing (Kamarajan et al., 2008; Kamarajan et al., 2009) respectively in the gambling task. In our earlier study, we analyzed the ERP waveforms, topography and functional significance of the ORN and ORP components in healthy individuals using a Single Outcome Gambling (SOG) task that involved monetary losses and gains (Kamarajan et al., 2009). To our knowledge, only very few studies have examined the ERP components of monetary reward processing in alcoholics, and the current study is the first study on alcoholics using a typical “gambling paradigm”.
