Abstract
The anticipation of favourable or unfavourable events is a key component in our daily life. However, the temporal dynamics of anticipation processes in relation to brain activation are still not fully understood. A modified version of the monetary incentive delay task was administered during separate functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalogram (EEG) sessions in the same 25 participants to assess anticipatory processes with a multi-modal neuroimaging set-up. During fMRI, gain and loss anticipation were both associated with heightened activation in ventral striatum and reward-related areas. EEG revealed most pronounced P300 amplitudes for gain anticipation, whereas CNV amplitudes distinguished neutral from gain and loss anticipation. Importantly, P300, but not CNV amplitudes, were correlated to neural activation in the ventral striatum for both gain and loss anticipation. Larger P300 amplitudes indicated higher ventral striatum blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) response. Early stimulus evaluation processes indexed by EEG seem to be positively related to higher activation levels in the ventral striatum, indexed by fMRI, which are usually associated with reward processing. The current results, however, point towards a more general motivational mechanism processing salient stimuli during anticipation.