Strength or Nausea? Children’s Reasoning About the Positive and Negative Health Consequences of Food Consumption.

• In Event: Poster Session 06
  In Poster Session: PS 06 Topic - Cognitive Processes

Abstract

Recent papers have shown that teaching food properties and body relationships to children promotes healthier eating-behavior in children (Weisman & Markman, 2017). Food properties, indeed, can either be positive/beneficial (e.g., “gives strength”) or negative/detrimental (e.g., “gives nausea”; Thibaut et al., 2020). Recent experiments revealed that children are able to use the positive/negative distinction productively from the age of 4 and, later on, develop naïve theories regarding food properties on various dimensions (Nguyen, 2008; Raman, 2014)
The present experiment focused on children’s generalization of positive and negative food properties to other, familiar and unfamiliar, foods. We distinguished two types of foods, whole foods, and transformed foods. Indeed, it has been suggested that food processing (i.e., signs of human intervention such as slicing) conveys information about item edibility. Do young children integrate these signals in their reasoning about food effects? We also studied how children’s food rejection profile (i.e., food neophobia and picky eating) would influence their inductive judgments in the food domain.
We hypothesized that if children integrated food transformation as an edibility cue in their generalizations, these would differ for sliced (processed) and whole (unprocessed). Further, we expected that children would generalize more positive and less negative properties to unfamiliar sliced foods than to whole unfamiliar foods. Finally, we expected that children displaying higher levels of food rejections would generalize more negative properties than children displaying lower levels of food rejections.
126 children, aged 41.3 to 77.1 months, performed an induction task in which they had to generalize positive or negative health-related properties to familiar or unfamiliar foods, whole or sliced (see Figure 1). We computed children’s probability of generalization for positive and negative properties. The children’s food rejection scores were assessed on a standardized food-rejection scale (Rioux et al., 2017). As shown in Figure 2, results indicated that children generalized the positive properties to sliced unfamiliar foods more often than they did to whole unfamiliar foods (z = 3.90, p < .001). However, children generalized the negative properties to sliced unfamiliar foods less often than they did to whole unfamiliar foods (z = -5.45, p < .001). Furthermore, children displaying higher levels of food rejections were more likely to generalize negative properties to sliced foods than children displaying lower levels of food rejections (Spearman’s correlation coefficient, r = 0.371, p < .001).
We conclude that children perceived unfamiliar foods that exhibit a transformation process as safer than unprocessed unfamiliar foods. This result suggests that food processing might help in fostering children’s acceptance of unfamiliar fruits and vegetables. Interestingly, food processing did not influence children’s generalization in the same way. Children with higher food rejection scores generalized negative properties to whole or sliced foods in the same way whereas children with lower rejection scores distinguished them. These data strongly suggest that children’s food rejection profiles highly influence the way they reason about food properties.

Authors

• Damien Foinant, Université Bourgogne Franche-Comté
  Presenting Author

• Jérémie Lafraire, Institut Paul Bocuse
  Non-Presenting Author

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