Rapid attentional orienting toward relevant stimuli and efficient disengagement from irrelevant stimuli are critical for survival. Here, we examined the roles of memory processes, emotional arousal and acute stress in attentional disengagement. To this end, 64 healthy participants encoded negative and neutral facial expressions and, after being exposed to a stress or control manipulation, performed an attention task in which they had to disengage from these previously encoded as well as novel face stimuli. During the attention task, electroencephalography (EEG) and pupillometry data were recorded. Our results showed overall faster reaction times after acute stress and when participants had to disengage from emotionally negative or old facial expressions. Further, pupil dilations were larger in response to neutral faces. During disengagement, our EEG data revealed a reduced N2pc amplitude when participants disengaged from neutral compared to negative facial expressions when these were not presented before, as well as earlier onset latencies for the N400f (for disengagement from negative and old faces), the N2pc, and the LPP (for disengagement from negative faces). In addition, early visual processing of negative faces, as reflected in the P1 amplitude, was enhanced specifically in stressed participants. Our findings indicate that attentional disengagement is improved for negative and familiar stimuli and that stress facilitates not only attentional disengagement but also emotional processing in general. Together, these processes may represent important mechanisms enabling efficient performance and rapid threat detection.

中文翻译：

---

优先注意处理：急性压力，记忆力和刺激性情绪有助于注意力分离。

对相关刺激的快速注意力定向以及与无关刺激的有效脱节对于生存至关重要。在这里，我们研究了记忆过程，情绪唤醒和急性压力在注意力分离中的作用。为此，有64位健康的参与者编码了负面和中性的面部表情，并且在受到压力或控制操作后，执行了一项注意力任务，其中他们必须脱离这些先前编码的以及新颖的面部刺激。在注意任务期间，记录了脑电图（EEG）和瞳孔测量数据。我们的研究结果表明，急性压力后以及参与者不得不摆脱情绪负面或过时的面部表情时，整体反应时间更快。此外，对中性脸的反应瞳孔扩大较大。在脱离时，我们的EEG数据显示，参与者从中性状态脱离时的N2pc振幅要比以前没有出现过的负面面部表情要低，并且N400f（用于从负和老面孔脱离），N2pc和LPP的早期发作延迟（用于脱离负面面孔）。此外，P1振幅所反映的负面面孔的早期视觉处理在压力较大的参与者中得到了特别增强。我们的研究结果表明，注意力分散可以改善负面和熟悉的刺激，压力不仅可以促进注意力分离，而且通常可以促进情绪处理。这些过程在一起可能代表了实现有效性能和快速威胁检测的重要机制。