The impact of informant type on children's animal knowledge learning

Li, Hui; Yu, Haoxue; Woolley, Jacqueline D.; Wu, Lihanjing

doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2022.101162

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Instead, studies that assessed the use of puppets in research on young children’s cognitive development found that “it makes no difference if the protagonist is presented as a real person, a puppet, a doll, a pictured storybook character, or a videotaped person” [p. 664, ref. ( 78 ), regarding false belief understanding; see also Li et al ( 79 ) regarding knowledge learning]. Nevertheless, future studies could consider comparing the impact of people and puppets on children’s edibility judgments.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

2022

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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.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%