Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.