Role of food neophobia and early exposure in children's implicit attentional bias to fruits and vegetables

Abstract

Children often struggle to eat the daily recommended servings of fruits and vegetables, and as a result many have poor nutrient intake. This is especially problematic for neophobic children; or those who are hesitant to try new foods. Maratos and Staples [Appetite, 91, 220–225 (2015)] found that children who are high in food neophobia show attentional biases to unfamiliar fruits and vegetables, which may be related to their low consumption of these healthy foods. The present study sought to replicate and extend these findings, by using a visual dot-probe task that paired images of fruits and vegetables to perceptually matched neutral control stimuli. Seventy-eight 5-8 year-old children (Mage = 6.4 years, SD = 1.1, 42% girls) participated. Initial analyses failed to reveal significant attentional biases to the foods in children who were high in neophobia. Subsequent exploratory analyses included children's previous exposure to the foods in the task as a moderator variable. These analyses revealed that overall, children showed an attentional bias away from familiar fruits and vegetables. Moreover, previous exposure to the foods moderated the effect of food neophobia on attentional bias. For children who were low in food neophobia, as their fruit and vegetable exposure increased, their attentional bias away from the familiar foods decreased. In contrast, for food neophobic children, as fruit and vegetable exposure increased, they showed more attentional bias away from familiar foods. Although these findings failed to replicate those reported by Maratos and Staples (2015), they suggest that children's attentional biases to healthy foods may be a result of the interplay between food neophobia and the food environment to which they are exposed.