An apple a day keeps the doctor away: Children's evaluative categories of food

This study explores how children evaluatively categorize foods based on their nutritional value. Three-year-olds, four-year-olds, sevenyear-olds, and adults completed a task in which they categorized a list of 70 foods as healthy or junky. The results showed important developmental differences in participants' ability to accurately classify foods as healthy/junky and to provide relevant justifications for these classifications. These results suggest that a large amount of category learning occurs with development, especially as children incorporate different types of information about food nutrition into their evaluative category representations. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.