task demands as costs that get discounted from the possible reward (Croxson et al., 2009; McGuire and Botvinick, 2010). There are however important questions that cannot be addressed with fMRI because of the slow characteristics of the hemodynamic response. Most importantly, studies using fMRI are not able to distinguish processing stages related to cue evaluation and task preparation processes in general, as well as potential differences in the temporal dynamics of such processes related to the processing and anticipation of reward and task demands. The present study was performed to tackle these questions of timing by using ERPs in an adapted version of the study by Krebs et al. (2012).
