The central finding of the current study is the temporal dissociation between processes related to the anticipation of potential reward and attentional demands. The earlier and more pronounced effect of reward compared to task difficulty appears to suggest that reward might influence visual processing of the cue stimuli in a more bottom-up way, while anticipated attentional demands seem to trigger a more voluntary (top-down) influence that arises later. This might relate to the idea that there could be different routes by which the dopaminergic system is recruited that has been previously suggested by other researchers (e.g., Salamone et al., 2005). Also, in patients with Parkinson’s disease, which is characterized by major disturbances of the dopaminergic system, voluntary attention mechanisms are affected while performances and processes in automatic attention tasks can remain intact (Brown and Marsden, 1988; Brown and Marsden, 1990; Yamaguchi and Kobayashi, 1998). Other studies have shown that reward associations, especially for task-irrelevant stimulus aspects, can distract participants from the task-relevant aspects and have a detrimental effect on performance (e.g., Hickey et al., 2010; Krebs et al., 2010, 2011,
