Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.