An apple a day keeps the doctor away: children's evaluative categories of food.
This study explores how children evaluatively categorize foods based on their nutritional value. Three-year-olds, four-year-olds, seven-year-olds, and adults completed a task in which they categorized a list of 70 foods as healthy or junky. The results showed important developmental differences in participants' ability to accurately classify foods as healthy/junky and to provide relevant justifications for these classifications. These results suggest that a large amount of category learning occurs with development, especially as children incorporate different types of information about food nutrition into their evaluative category representations.
Nguyen
Simone P
SP
Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina, 601 South College Road, Wilmington, NC 28403 5612, USA. nguyens@uncw.edu
D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003210:Concept Formation; D005260:Female; D005502:Food / Q000145:classification*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D052756:Nutritional Sciences / Q000193:education*; D009753:Nutritive Value