The electrocortical response to rewarding and aversive feedback: The reward positivity does not reflect salience in simple gambling tasks

The Reward Positivity (RewP) is an event-related potential (ERP) potentiated to monetary gains and reduced to monetary losses. Recently, competing data suggest that more salient outcomes elicit a positivity relative to less salient outcomes, regardless of valence. However, all previous work testing the impact of salience on the RewP have examined expected versus unexpected outcomes. In the current study, participants completed the same gambling task twice in which feedback was equally probable: in one condition, feedback indicated monetary gain or loss-and in the other condition, feedback indicated either safety or punishment from subsequent electric shock. Traditional ERP and principal component analysis (PCA)-derived measures confirmed that the RewP was more positive to feedback signaling monetary gain and safety from shock compared to feedback signaling monetary loss and punishment with shock. These results align with models in which the RewP indexes reward-related processes, including reward prediction error models. Potential explanations for salience-based effects on the RewP are discussed.