Dr. Julie Lumeng is a developmental and behavioral pediatrician whose goal is to improve the understanding of cognitive influences on eating behavior in low-income preschool-aged children, and to parlay these findings into improved interventions to shape children's eating behavior and food preferences. She will approach this goal through obtaining unique interdisciplinary training in cognitive developmental psychology, statistical analysis, study design, and the development of public health nutrition education programs. Dr. Susan Gelman, Professor of Psychology, will serve as the primary sponsor, and a mentoring committee with faculty in the Schools of Public Health, Education, and Medicine will bring diverse expertise to the research and training. Preschool-aged children only extend a new food preference from one food to another if they identify the two foods as being in the same category. Children also appear to be more reliant than adults on using similarities between foods to make food choices. Which characteristics lead children to identify two foods as similar, however, is poorly understood. Food is a unique stimulus for which there appear to be innate behavioral predispositions for certain characteristics, such as color, to be more salient than others in the assessment of similarity. Dr. Lumeng is currently investigating which dimensions of foods, and the models eating them, are most important to children in making food choices. This work is funded by an R21. The present proposal seeks to determine if children's methods of categorizing foods translate to their eating behavior, and if these cognitions can be used to develop an effective intervention to shape food preferences in a Head Start setting with low-income preschoolers.
The aims are therefore: (1) To determine if promoting children's concept formation on specific dimensions will lead to greater acceptance and consumption of target foods;(2) To determine if enhancing perceptual and conceptual fluency will result in more rapid development of increased preference for a food;and (3) To determine the feasibility of a nutrition education intervention promoting concept formation around food in a population of children attending Head Start. The project is directly relevant to public health in that it seeks to develop an intervention to shape food preferences in preschoolers which may alter obesity risk in the long-term. In the context of the growing childhood obesity epidemic, improved nutrition education interventions for young children are needed.
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