Tears for pears: Influence of children’s neophobia on categorization performance and strategy in the food domain

Abstract

Preschoolers’ neophobic dispositions mainly target fruits and vegetables. They received a great deal of attention in the past decades as these dispositions represent the main psychological barrier to dietary variety. Recently, children’s food neophobia has been found to be negatively correlated with their categorization performance (i.e., the accuracy to discriminate between food categories). We investigated categorization strategies among neophobic children, tendencies to favor one type of error over the other (misses over false alarms), in order to compensate for their poor categorization performance. To capture children’s categorization strategies, we used the Signal Detection Theory framework. A first experiment assessed 120 3-to-6-years old children’ sensitivity to discriminate between foods and nonfoods as well as their decision criterion (i.e., response strategy). In a second experiment, we manipulated the influence of food processing. The hypothesis was that food processing acts as a sign of human interventions that decreases uncertainty about edibility and thus promotes feelings of safety in the food domain. 137 children were tested on a food versus nonfood categorization task contrasting whole and sliced stimuli. In both experiments, increased levels of food neophobia were significantly associated with poorer categorization sensitivity and with a more conservative decision criterion (i.e., favoring “it is inedible” errors). Additionally, results from Experiment 2 revealed that food processing did not influence neophobic children, whereas their neophilic counterparts adopted a more liberal decision criterion for sliced stimuli than for whole stimuli. These findings are the first demonstration of a relationship between a decision criterion and food neophobia in young children. These results have strong implications for theories of food neophobia and laid the groundwork for designing novel types of food education interventions.

Relationships between executive functions and food rejection dispositions in young children

“…For instance, conceptual knowledge and categorization are cognitive factors fundamental to food-related decision-making, which are involved in food rejection (Foinant et al, 2021a(Foinant et al, , 2021bHarris, 2018;Lafraire et al, 2016;Pickard et al, 2021aPickard et al, , 2021bRioux et al, 2016Rioux et al, , 2018. Indeed, children's food rejection has been found to be inversely related to their ability to categorize vegetables and fruits (Rioux et al, 2016), their knowledge about contextual associations (i.e., knowledge of the complementary roles of two foods such as a burger bun and a patty or the relation between a particular food, a turkey, and its typical context of consumption, thanksgiving; Pickard et al, 2021a) or their ability to generalize food properties (Rioux et al, 2018).…”

“…Food rejection also influences how children generalize post-ingestion effects on health, with neophobic children inferring more negative properties (e.g., "gives nausea") to foods compared to less neophobic children (Foinant et al, 2021a). Whereas these abilities can be associated with food neophobia and pickiness (Foinant et al, 2021b), food neophobia is often found to be a better predictor of children's categorization and reasoning than their food pickiness (Foinant et al, 2021a;Rioux et al, 2018). One interpretation of these results is in terms of a lack of the necessary knowledge to solve the categorization tasks.…”

FEED your mind: The evolutionary roots of human food cognition

“…For instance, the gain of energy when eating cooked starches, such as potatoes, is quantifiable between 12-35% (Carmody & Wrangham, 2009). In addition to being a ubiquitous part of food culture (Wrangham, 2009), processing often reduces the toxicity of raw foods and signals previous human intervention, which could act as cues of edibility and safety, two important features when evaluating potential food items (Coricelli et al, 2022;Foinant et al, 2021Foinant et al, , 2022Rioux & Wertz, 2021;Hesse & Knight, 2022).…”

“…Infants display attenuated neophobic behaviors towards novel processed plant foods (e.g., unfamiliar fruits and vegetables cut into pieces) compared to novel unprocessed whole plants with fruits (Rioux & Wertz, 2021). Children more often judge cut non-food items as being foods, compared to whole non-food items, and assign negative properties (e.g., "This food makes you throw up") less often to processed foods compared to unprocessed foods (Foinant et al, 2021(Foinant et al, , 2022. Recently, Coricelli and colleagues (2022) investigated safety evaluations of foods with different degrees of processing, ranging from unprocessed (raw) to processed (cut or cooked in a puree), at both the explicit and implicit level (using a Go no/Go Association Test, GNAT, Nosek & Banaji 2001).…”

“…Food neophobia is closely intertwined with the development of categorization abilities in the food domain. Children that are not able to efficiently categorize fruits and vegetables and make predictions about these food objects based on their categories (e.g., "this is a tomato, hence it is safe to eat") are more likely to be highly neophobic (Foinant et al, 2022;Pickard et al, 2022;Rioux et al 2016Rioux et al , 2017Rioux et al , 2018. Fruits and vegetables might be more difficult to categorize than other foods (e.g., starchy foods) and hence trigger rejection, because they exhibit important changes in color, shape or preparation between servings and can be more easily perceived as unfamiliar (Brown & Harris, 2012a).…”