Everyday human behavior is guided by internal states and objectives that interact with external factors. Central among these external influences are reward and reward prediction. The dopaminergic midbrain is known to play a critical role in these reward-related processes and to be central to reinforcement learning (e.g., Glimcher, 2011; Wise and Rompre, 1989). It has been shown that stimuli predicting the possibility to obtain a reward invoke neuronal activity that is similar to that triggered by the reward itself in both animal (e.g., Mirenowicz and Schultz, 1994; Schultz et al., 1997) and human research (e.g., D’Ardenne et al., 2008; Knutson and Cooper, 2005; Knutson et al., 2005; Schott et al., 2008; Zaghloul et al., 2009). This process is believed to simultaneously energize cognitive and motor processes that may help to successfully obtain the reward (Salamone and Correa, 2012). Along such lines, the anticipation of reward has been shown to enhance a wide range of cognitive operations, including memory and novelty processing (e.g., Adcock et al., 2006; Krebs et al., 2009; Wittmann et al., 2005, 2008), perceptual discrimination (e.g., Engelmann and
