Strawberries and Cream: The Relationship between Young Children’s Food Rejection and Thematic Category Knowledge of Food

• In Event: Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Topic - Cognitive Processes

Abstract

Establishing healthy dietary habits in childhood is crucial in preventing long-term repercussions, as a lack of dietary variety in childhood leads to long-term impacts on both physical and cognitive health. A main psychological barrier to a varied diet in young children is food rejection, namely the fear of novel food stimuli or situations known as food neophobia. A lack of familiarity or recognition for potential food sources is believed to be a driving factor of neophobic responses to food. Food acceptance partly demands adequate food recognition to guide cues of food edibility, appropriateness and even hedonic liking. Following this line of reasoning, interventions to facilitate food recognition and representation in young children are crucial to foster increased food acceptance. When confronted with unfamiliar items or food, our recognition and understanding depends upon the inference that knowledge structures such as thematic (complementary relations) and taxonomic categorization (shared features) allow. However, the large majority of interventions, which aim to foster dietary variety and healthy eating, do not capitalize on children’s incipient knowledge and use of categorization when interpreting unfamiliar instances. The present research aims to fill this research gap by expanding upon seminal developmental studies showing that categorization is crucial in children’s reasoning and subsequent decisions about food. More precisely, our study investigates i) the development of conceptual category knowledge about food (namely taxonomic and thematic) and ii) explores the putative relationship between children’s food rejection (as measured by the Child Food Rejection Scale) and taxonomic and thematic knowledge about food. A proportional (A:B::C:?) analogy task, with a choice between taxonomic (i.e. bread and pasta) and thematic (i.e. bread and butter) food associates, was conducted on children between three and seven-years-old (n = 144). The children were systematically presented with either a thematic or taxonomic food category base pair (A:B) and then asked to extend the example type of categorization to choose the respective thematic or taxonomic match to the target (C:?). Our results revealed, for the first time, that increased levels of food rejection were significantly predictive of poor thematic category knowledge in the food domain. Increased food rejection was predictive of poorer food identification and decreased thematic responding. Familiarity and thematic category knowledge in the food domain may indeed be conducive to greater food acceptance in young children. These findings entitle us to hypothesize that knowledge-based food education programs should not only aim to improve taxonomic understanding of food, but also thematic reasoning to overcome food rejection tendencies in young children.

Authors

• Abigail Pickard, Aston University
  Presenting Author

• Jean-Pierre Thibaut, Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comte
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jérémie Lafraire, Institut Paul Bocuse
  Non-Presenting Author