Project Details
Projekt
"F.E.E.D. your mind": The evolved cognitive processes underlying food evaluation and learning in early life
Applicant
Dr.-Ing. Camille Rioux, Ph.D.
Subject Area
Developmental and Educational Psychology
Developmental Neurobiology
Developmental Neurobiology
Term
from 2021 to 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 491623601
The rise of food-related health issues (e.g., obesity) calls for action. Food behaviors take shape early in ontogeny and track well into adulthood, such that shedding light on the cognitive processes underpinning food behaviors in early life is key to tackling food-related health challenges. This is the overarching goal of the "F.E.E.D. your mind" project. The project adopts a novel perspective on food evaluation and learning in early life. Current research has largely overlooked that our modern food environment strongly differs from the environment in which our ancestors lived and our brains evolved. In fact, in most cultures today, decisions about food are made during a trip to the grocery store, where foods have been already processed and packaged. In the grocery store, we might ask ourselves: "Are these canned tomatoes healthy?" but we certainly do not ask: "Are they edible?" or "Is this even food?". As a result, scholars missed that a critical step in learning and deciding what to eat over the course of ontogeny, is determining which entities in the world are wholesome food items and which ones are harmful items to eschew. This project aims to address this research question with three complementary approaches. First, I will investigate the ontogeny and neural basis of the capacity to recognize food objects (AIM 1). In particular, I will test whether the capacity to identify edible objects emerge when infants transition to solid food, guiding infants’ attention to food-relevant inputs, such as social information about edibility or toxicity. Second, I will study the social component of food learning processes, once infants are able to recognize food objects (AIM 2). Namely, I hypothesize that infants show a negativity bias when learn-ing about food from others, giving more weight to negative than to positive information, because ingesting a toxic food is likely a more costly error than missing on a food oppor-tunity. Finally, building on the results of AIM 1 and 2, I will investigate the longitudinal relationship between the processes underlying food recognition and learning in early life and food behaviors later in childhood (AIM 3). I will explore how infants’ capacity to recognize food objects and their sensitivity to negative information when learning about food, shape their behaviors towards food later in childhood.The strength of the "F.E.E.D your mind" project is that it uses robust methods from neurosciences (e.g., EEG), and psychology, to conduct pioneering investigation of the ontogenetic and evolutionary roots of human food behaviors. This project will enrich our understanding of the countless food choices young children make on a daily basis, and pave a way toward designing evidence-based interventions for fostering healthy food choices in early life.
DFG Programme
WBP Fellowship
International Connection
France
