Poster #21 - Food Rejection and Categorization: the Mediating Role of Cognitive Flexibility.

• In Event: Poster Session 09

Abstract

Much of the developmental work investigating individual differences in food rejection has focused on the contribution of external or environmental factors (Lafraire et al., 2016). However, recent studies have shown that young children’s food rejection is also negatively related to the fundamental cognitive processes of categorization (Pickard et al., 2021; Rioux et al., 2016) and executive functions, in particular cognitive flexibility (Foinant et al., 2022). Here, for the first time, we examine the relations among food rejection, categorization, and executive functions. Considering the evidence that executive functions are important to categorization performance (Blaye & Jacques, 2009; Lagarrigue & Thibaut, 2020), two experiments investigated whether food rejection is related to the latter directly or indirectly, through the mediating effect of cognitive flexibility.
For the two experiments, we collected each child’s food rejection, main executive functions (working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility), and vocabulary scores. In the first experiment, 122 4-to-6-year-olds were shown color photographs of vegetables and “other things” (fruits and utensils) and asked to put items belonging to the same category in the same box. At post-test, children had to name all the food items. The results, controlling for other executive functions, vocabulary, and naming scores, revealed that children’s food rejection scores were related to categorization directly (β = -.212, p = .005) and indirectly through the mediating role of cognitive flexibility (Sobel’s z = -2.39, β = -.073, p = .024).
To isolate the direct and indirect effects, in a second experiment, 100 3-to-6-year-olds performed a double choices categorization task. Children had to successively select two different foods that were either taxonomically (e.g., a pear) or thematically (e.g., a codfish) associated with a target food (e.g., a lemon) while ignoring a distractor (e.g., a natural-flavored yogurt). The first choice was assumed to not require much cognitive monitoring and to correspond to the participants’ most salient choice. The subsequent second choice, presumably a conflicting and less salient choice, required flexibility because participants had to switch between conceptual representations. The results revealed that children’s food rejection scores were only directly related to their performance at first choice (β = -.219, p = .032) and that cognitive flexibility did not mediate this relation (z = -0.47, β = -.015, p = .639). As for children’s performance to successively select both correct choices, we found no direct effect (β = -.133, p = .175) and cognitive flexibility fully mediated the relation between food rejection and categorization (z = -2.18, β = -.086, p = .018).
As demonstrated by the indirect effect, children with high food rejection who have deficits in cognitive flexibility show a limited ability to monitor and flexibly process information effectively in complex categorization situations. On the other hand, the direct effect suggests that some other factors may contribute to lower categorization performance in children with high food rejection. These results laid the groundwork for designing novel types of food education interventions that aim to foster healthy eating by targeting children’s food cognition.

Authors

• Damien Foinant, Université Bourgogne Franche-Comté
  Presenting Author

• Jérémie Lafraire, Institut Paul Bocuse

• Jean-Pierre Thibaut, Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comte