Abigail Kortenhoeven¹, Michael Serra², Miranda Scolari¹; ¹Texas Tech University, ²Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center

Eyewitness testimony is the primary source of evidence in roughly 77,000 criminal cases in the United States each year, but its accuracy is highly variable. Research suggests high levels of stress are linked to impaired accuracy of eyewitness testimony, but the underlying cause of this impairment is unknown. Recent work suggests that individuals in a state of stress show an attentional bias towards threat-related stimuli compared to non-threatening stimuli. The current study seeks to make connections between stress and overt visual attention during a criminal event. The experimental group completed the Maastricht Acute Stress Task (MAST), alternating a mental arithmetic task with placing their hand on an ice pack inside a Ziploc bag. The control group used an upwards counting task and a room temperature icepack. Both groups watched CCTV footage of an armed robbery at a convenience store made publicly available by the Denver Police Department while an Eyelink 1000 tracker captured eye movements across pre-assigned dynamic interest areas. Self-reported stress measures, blood pressure, and pulse readings were used to assess participant stress levels prior to and after viewing the CCTV footage. Current trends within the preliminary self-report data (N = 8) suggest that the experimental group experienced higher levels of stress (M = 19) than the control group (M = 9) following the protocol. Importantly, the eye-tracking data provide support for our hypothesis: Comparing each interest area across groups indicates that the experimental group spent significantly more time fixating the perpetrator while the control group spent significantly more time fixating the weapons. This suggests that stress may impact the visual details individuals overtly attend to while witnessing a crime. Future analyses will explore whether these different eye movement patterns during encoding predict accuracy on a subsequent memory task.