Eat your vegetables: Investigating how infants learn about healthy foods

• Applicant: Dr. Annie Wertz
• Subject Area: Developmental and Educational Psychology
• Term: from 2022 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 497501131

Developing healthy eating habits is important in the first years of life because many food preferences are acquired early in development. But this process can be quite challenging for parents. Young children, who are in the process of learning what to eat, often do not readily accept novel foods but instead first tend to show avoidance behaviors towards them. Healthy food items such as fruits and vegetables tend to be the most commonly rejected items, causing a significant reduction of children's dietary variety, which can have detrimental effects on children's health and development. It is therefore of critical importance to understand how young children learn about foods in order to identify specific mechanisms that increase acceptance of healthy foods early in life. This is the overarching goal of the present project. Specifically, the present project aims to investigate particular actions infants rely on to learn that a novel food is safe to eat, and thus overcome their initial avoidance of that food. We focus on two specific types of actions: (1) eating, and (2) food processing (e.g., cutting). Eating actions and food processing actions are essential components of human food behaviors, but the impact of food processing actions on food learning remains largely unknown, particularly in infancy. Some of our recent work suggests that infants view cues of food processing as a signal of food safety and show attenuated avoidance behaviors towards processed plant foods compared to unprocessed whole plants. To more directly interrogate food learning processes, this project will test whether infants view food processing actions as a signal of edibility per se by directly comparing them to eating actions.To do this, we will conduct an eye-tracking experiment with 12-month-old infants. First, infants will be presented with a side-by-side video display of an adult performing two different actions with novel foods across three conditions (eating, food processing, and a food-irrelevant control). We will test whether infants differentially attend to food processing actions—and whether they view food processing actions similarly to eating actions—by assessing which action infants look longer at and their pupillary changes while looking at each action. Then, we will offer infants the novel foods shown in the videos and measure their choices and eating behaviors.Our results will shed light on the attentional mechanisms underlying food learning in the first years of life, and reveal what forms of social information infants use to learn that a novel food is safe to eat. The findings will help identify important mechanisms that increase acceptance of healthy foods early in life. This would be particularly important for future projects developing effective interventions for promoting the adoption of healthy eating habits during this critical food learning phase.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants