Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.