In the present study participants performed a cued visual discrimination task in which targets were preceded by cues that indicated not only the target location but simultaneously the level of task difficulty and the possibility to receive a monetary reward in case of a correct and fast response. Krebs et al. (2012) already demonstrated the utility of this task to assess cognitive processes related to the prospect of reward and task demands. Again, in the current study the experimental manipulations were proven successful in that reward improved discrimination performance (more accurate and faster responses), which furthermore interacted with the manipulation of task difficulty.
