Current research indicates a tight relationship between cognition, emotion, and motivation, providing growing evidence that stimuli of emotional and motivational salience are preferentially processed, reflected at both behavioural and neural level. Recently, it has been proposed that this processing advantage is not limited to stimuli of emotional content; moreover, inherently neutral stimuli also have been shown to acquire increased salience through motivational context and affective learning mechanisms. In our project, we could demonstrate that increased stimulus salience, associated via monetary gain or loss, boosts early sensory processing, even when participants remained unaware of the implicitly acquired associations.