Acording to social information processing theories, aggressive children are hypersensitive to cues of hostility and threat in other people's behavior. However, even though there is ample evidence that aggressive children over-interpret others' behaviors as hostile, it is unclear whether this hostile attribution tendency does actually result from overattending to hostile and threatening cues. Since encoding is posited to consist of rapid automatic processes, it is hard to assess with the selfreport measures that have been used so far. Therefore, we used a novel approach to investigate visual encoding of social information. The eye movements of thirty 10-13 year old children with lower levels and thirty children with higher levels of aggressive behavior were monitored in real time with an eyetracker, as the children viewed ten different cartoon series of ambiguous provocation situations. In addition, participants answered questions concerning encoding and interpretation. Aggressive children did not attend more to hostile cues, nor attend less to non-hostile cues than non-aggressive children. Contrary, aggressive children looked longer at non-hostile cues, but nonetheless attributed more hostile intent than their non-aggressive peers. These findings contradict the traditional bottom-up processing hypotheses that aggressive behavior would be related with failure to attend to non-hostile cues. The findings seem best explained by topdown information processing, where aggressive children's pre-existing hostile intent schemata (1) direct attention towards schema inconsistent nonhostile cues, (2) prevent further processing and recall of such schema-inconsistent information, and (3) lead to hostile intent attribution and aggressive responding, disregarding the schema-inconsistent non-hostile information. Keywords Aggressive behavior . Social cognition . Information processing . Social information processingSocial information processing (SIP) plays important roles in the development of social and aggressive behavior. Aggressive behavior is associated with and predicted by specific social information-processing patterns and interventions targeting these patterns are relatively effective . Social information-processing models (SIP; Crick and Dodge 1994;Dodge 1986;Lemerise and Arsenio 2000) propose that, to react appropriately to social situations, social information has to be encoded accurately, the encoded information has to be represented correctly, an interaction goal needs to be specified, adaptive emotions need to arise and to be regulated, response alternatives have to be generated, these response alternatives have to be evaluated, and the selected response has to be enacted.Numerous studies have shown that aggressive behavior is associated with deviations in interaction goals, emotion regulation, response generation, evaluation, and enactment (Crick and Dodge 1994;Dodge 2006;Dodge and Pettit 2003;Fontaine 2008). Concerning representation of intent, a meta-analytic review demonstrated a robust relation between...