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Validating Temporal Eye Tracking Metrics as Orthogonal Biomarkers for Aggressive Traits: A Mixed-Effects Analysis
Omar Alvarado-Cando1,2, Oscar Casanova-Carvajal2,3, José-Javier Serrano-Olmedo2,4
1Psychology Brain and Innovation in Neuroscience Group, Facultad de Informática y Ciencias de la Computación, Universidad Católica de Cuenca, Cuenca 010107, Ecuador.
Journal of Eye Movement Research
|May 27, 2026
Summary
Aggressive individuals consistently focus longer on negative stimuli, while adolescents show distinct early attention shifts. These visual attention patterns offer new avenues for aggression screening.
Area of Science:
- Psychology
- Neuroscience
- Developmental Science
Background:
- Atypical visual attention to threatening stimuli is linked to aggression.
- The developmental differences in visual attention (sustained vs. orienting) in aggression are not well understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the temporal dynamics of visual attentional biases in aggressive and non-aggressive children and adolescents.
- To explore how sustained visual allocation and early orienting differ across development in aggressive individuals.
Main Methods:
- Utilized a free-viewing paradigm with International Affective Picture System (IAPS) stimuli.
- Employed eye-tracking to analyze first-fixation direction and dwell time in 119 participants (aggressive vs. non-aggressive cohorts).
- Applied Linear Mixed-Effect Models (LMM) and Generalized Linear Mixed-Effects Models (GLMM) for analysis.
Main Results:
- Aggressive individuals showed greater sustained visual attention toward negative stimuli across all ages (LMM).
- Early orienting differences to negative stimuli were more pronounced in aggressive adolescents, not younger children (GLMM age-by-condition interaction).
Conclusions:
- Sustained visual preference for negative content is a stable correlate of aggression.
- Early orienting differences in visual attention are developmentally modulated in aggressive individuals.
- Temporal eye-tracking measures offer complementary data for computational aggression screening.
