Dietary composition is an important contributor to childhood overweight risk, but interventions to alter food preferences (and therefore choices) have limited efficacy. Our understanding of how food preferences are transmitted between individuals, how modeling functions to increase food acceptance, how repeated exposure increases liking, and how children extend a preference from one food to another is limited. An improved understanding of how these basic mechanisms operate to shape food preferences and choices could be applied to the development of more sophisticated, directed, and effective eating behavior interventions that would have broad applicability in homes, schools, communities, and via the media. Eating behavior, food preferences, and cognitions around food all develop rapidly in the preschool age range, and therefore early childhood is targeted as the period for study and eventual intervention. The study of eating behavior development has not yet been merged with the rapidly developing knowledge base in children's language development, concept formation, and theory of mind. This proposal seeks to develop and explore potential connections between several domains of child development and eating behavior, thereby providing the basis for needed interventions to address increasing rates of childhood overweight.
Specific Aim I : To determine how characteristics of foods contribute to young children's concept formation around food, and whether or not these conceptions are associated with extension of a newly formed food preference.
Specific Aim II : To determine the effect of food-related language, familiarity, and recall in influencing young children's food preferences, and if these effects are transmitted across different settings.
Specific Aim III : To determine how young children use theory of mind to evaluate the validity and applicability of a model's food preferences in guiding their own eating behavior. Research Design: Given the growing disparities in child overweight risk based on socioeconomic status and race/ethnicity, the population studied will be low-income children of minority ethnicity aged 3-5 years attending Head Start in both urban and rural settings. Children will participate individually in a series of experimental paradigms testing hypotheses related to each of the three Specific Aims. All research will be conducted in children's natural settings (at Head Start). Translation of laboratory findings to classroom mealtime behavior will be tested. Results of the proposed experiments will lead to the development of an intervention program to alter children's food preferences and eating behavior that will be tested in subsequent studies.
| Frazier, Brandy N; Gelman, Susan A; Kaciroti, Niko et al. (2012) I'll have what she's having: the impact of model characteristics on children's food choices. Dev Sci 15:87-98 |
| Lumeng, Julie C; Cardinal, Tiffany M; Jankowski, Meghan et al. (2008) Children's use of adult testimony to guide food selection. Appetite 51:302-10 |
