In this study, preschool children were tested in a food versus nonfood categorization task. We studied the influence of edibility cues such as food processing (whole versus sliced items) on children’s categorization abilities. We also correlated children’s categorization performance and strategy with their food rejection scores (neophobia). 137 children aged 4-6 years were asked to discriminate foods from nonfoods. Results revealed that food processing features (slicing) afforded edibility, leading to potentially hazardous incorrect categorization. We also found that children’s categorization performance was negatively correlated with their food rejection scores. Moreover, as expected, children with high food rejection scores displayed a more conservative categorization strategy (i.e., categorizing food items as inedible) than children with lower food rejection scores. However, contrary to our expectations, both performance and strategy of less neophobic and picky children were affected by food processing. These children committed dangerous errors, categorizing many nonfood items as food when sliced.

Children build concepts for food categories which they use in property induction-generalization situations. Which factorschildren do favor in their inductive strategies and to what extent interindividual differences, such as food neophobia, affectthem remains unclear. We used an induction task with negative and positive properties, and manipulated the familiarity(i.e., familiar and unfamiliar) and the state (i.e., untransformed and transformed) of foods. This study is the first to addressthe role of interindividual differences in inductive reasoning strategies in the case of opposed valence properties. Resultsrevealed that positive and negative properties are not generalized the same way, depending on the food familiarity andstate. In addition, we observed that neophobic children were characterized by different inductive strategies for negativeproperties compared to their neophilic counterparts. We conclude that food neophobia is sensitive to risk uncertainty andtherefore, caution should be taken when introducing new foods to preschoolers.

Food neophobia – the reluctance to eat novel food – has been associated with poorer performance in category-based tasks within the food domain among preschoolers. This research aims to unravel this negative relationship and determine if this association is specific to food items or reflects general cognitive rigidity in considering alternative ways to represent entities. In study 1, 123 children between 3 and 6 years were tested on an inductive reasoning task, comparing food and animals. In study 2, 112 children aged 4 to 6 engaged in a cross-categorization task comparing food, animals and artifacts. Results indicated that neophobic children exhibited poorer induction and cross-categorization performance in all domains compared to their neophilic counterparts. These findings highlight the importance of child characteristics in shaping the general development of category-based abilities and suggest that food neophobia, rather than a fear of novelty, reflects instead difficulties in changing perspectives once items have been classified.