Poster #192 - Children Know Food is Contaminated Before Using Knowledge to Inform Behavior

• In Event: 3-003 - Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

Choosing appropriate foods and avoiding potentially dangerous foods is critical for survival. Yet, young children make notoriously poor eating decisions. Children under two-years-old are the most likely to accidentally poison themselves (Cashdan, 1994), and preschoolers eat foods that adults find disgusting, such as imitation feces and sneezed-in foods (DeJesus et al., 2014; Rozin, Hammer et al., 1986). However, same-aged preschoolers have a rudimentary understanding of some aspects of contamination: they know that invisible materials may be transferred into substances such that a contaminant can exist even after it is physically removed (Au et al., 1993), and they know that not all illnesses are equally contagious (e.g., a scraped knee is less contagious than a sneeze; Kalish, 1999). Thus, children’s mistakes in food choice may not be due solely to misunderstanding contamination. Here, we ask when children understand that germs contaminate food and whether they use this knowledge to influence their food choice.

To do so, we use a second body of research, which indicates that food choice is social from early in life. Infants eat foods liked by native language speakers (Shutts et al., 2009) and expect food choice to be guided by a person’s cultural group (Liberman et al., 2016). Therefore, we ask how children integrate social information (e.g., the language that someone speaks), and information about contamination (e.g., whether a food was sneezed on) when deciding whether to eat a food. Specifically, we recruited 3- to 11- year old children (N= 185) at a local science museum. Participants watched a video where an English speaker (native) and a Russian speaker (foreign) each ate and liked a food. However, one of the speakers contaminated her food by sneezing on it. Across experiments, we varied whether the foreign speaker (Study 1) or the native speaker (Study 2) contaminated her food. We asked children which food they wanted to eat (forced choice), and how germy each food was on a four-point scale from “not germy” (0) to “very germy” (3). We analyzed the results in two-year age groups to investigate the developmental trajectory.

Overall, our results indicated that children rated contaminated foods as germier. When the foreign speaker contaminated her food, children rated it as germier by the youngest age tested [all ps<.02]. When the native speaker contaminated her food, children rated it as germier by age 5 [all ps<.01]. However, even though young children could understand contamination, they did not always use it to choose a food. Instead, they cared about the language of the speaker who had eaten each food. When the native speaker’s food was clean, children of all ages ate the clean food (all binomial ps<.04, one-tailed), replicating previous findings of language guiding food choice. But, when the foreign speaker’s food was clean, only the oldest children, 9- to -11-year-olds, significantly chose the clean food (binomial p=.01). Thus, although children know when a food is contaminated early in development, they consider both whether a food is contaminated and who contaminated it when deciding what to eat.

Authors

• Diane Lee, University of California, Santa Barbara
  Presenting Author

• Zoe Liberman, University of California Santa Barbara
  Non-Presenting Author