Flavors of Reward Positivity: Testing the Psychometric Properties of Tasks used to Elicit the Reward Positivity in Healthy Individuals

The reward positivity (RewP) is a widely used ERP marker of reward processing, yet studies vary substantially in the tasks used to elicit it and in the quality and reliability of the resulting data. These inconsistencies make it difficult to determine whether differences in RewP findings reflect true variations in reward processing or simply differences in task design and measurement. The present study will directly compare three common monetary feedback tasks, the doors task, the monetary incentive delay task, and the time estimation task, to evaluate how task features influence RewP amplitude, data quality, and internal reliability. Healthy adults will complete all three tasks in randomized order across two research sites, and single-trial RewP data will be analyzed using Bayesian multilevel location–scale models. This approach allows us to examine both mean differences and variance components, providing a detailed picture of how each task performs psychometrically. By identifying which tasks produce stronger, cleaner, or more reliable RewP signals, this study aims to clarify how task design shapes RewP measurement and to support more interpretable, comparable, and reproducible findings in reward-processing research.