Social scientists have long noted that people experiencing poverty regularly make decisions that are likely to further deteriorate their financial situations. Previous studies have demonstrated that people living in poverty, as opposed to people not living in poverty, tend to focus more on short-term goals, put less income into savings, take out loans with higher interest rates, play more low-probability lotteries, etc., and have explained this empirical regularity using structural, cultural, and personality factors of the poor. More recently, scholars have developed an alternative explanation in which the experience of living in poverty engenders a ‘scarcity mindset,’ under which the short-term demands of limited financial resources deplete basic cognitive resources such as attention and bandwidth, leaving fewer of these resources for long-term financial decisions. The scarcity mindset explanation leads to several key empirical predictions, including that the experience of living in poverty (1) leads to an attentional bias toward scarcity-related demands, (2) leads to more deliberative short-term economic decisions, and (3) reduces cognitive capacity and control, increasing time discounting and risk aversion. The current project uses a laboratory experiment to revisit the predictions of scarcity mindset theory, addressing two major gaps in the existing literature: (1) the validity of the poverty measurement, and (2) the lack of measurement of the key mechanisms of attentional bias and cognitive load. In particular, the study employs eye tracking technology to measure attentional bias to financial considerations in a competing-information environment, as well as cognitive load when participants are considering situations of financial hardship.