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.

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.

Category-based induction in the food domain is of key importance to generalize food knowledge to new instances of food and therefore to enlarge children's dietary repertoire. Generics are well known linguistic cues for boosting induction in young children because they facilitate the access to pieces of conceptual knowledge. However, we hypothesized that some children could not benefit from this facilitating effect of generics because they are equipped with a poor system of conceptual knowledge about food. These children are those exhibiting intense food neophobia disposition (i.e. the fear of novel food). In experiment 1, 4-6 years old children (n=137) were asked to complete an induction task adapted from Gelman, 2002 depicting properties in two conditions (i.e., generics vs specific quantifiers). In experiment 2 (ongoing) we followed a similar procedure, except that we used conflicting triads paradigm. Our preliminary results confirmed that food neophobia hindered the facilitating effect of generics.