Food rejection and the development of food category-based induction in 2-6 years old children

We studied children's inductive inferences within the domain of food categories. There has so far been little research on inductive reasoning about food among children, despite the theoretical and practical importance of knowing what knowledge children bring to the table and how they use it. We tested the hypotheses that children's food category-based induction performances and their food rejection are negatively correlated, and that these performances are influenced by the colour typicality of the food items. We recruited 126 children aged 2-6 years, and administered a category-based induction task. Participants were successively shown 8 sets of three pictures containing one target picture (a vegetable) and two test pictures (a vegetable dissimilar in colour to the target picture and a fruit similar in colour to the target picture). For each set, participants were told a novel property about the target picture and asked to generalise this property to one of the two test pictures. Additionally, the parents of each child filled out a questionnaire about his or her food rejection tendencies. Results on accuracy (i.e. if participants generalised the properties according to category membership, not perceptual similarity) provided the first empirical evidence in favour of a negative relationship between children's food rejection and food category-based induction.