F.E.E.D. your mind · FEED your mind: Investigating the nature, ontogeny and evolution of cognitive processes underlying food behaviors, to pave a way toward efficient interventions promoting healthy eating in early life

FEED your mind: Investigating the nature, ontogeny and evolution of cognitive processes underlying food behaviors, to pave a way toward efficient interventions promoting healthy eating in early life

We make dozens of food choices on a daily basis. In many cultures, many of those choices are made during a trip to the grocery store where food items have been already processed and packaged by others. There we might pick up a can of tomatoes and ask ourselves: Are these healthy? or Are they suitable to serve at a fancy dinner party? but we certainly do not need to ask: Are they edible or harmful? or Are they even food? Instead, detailed food labels indicate all of the ingredients of a food product, the macronutrients present, its caloric content, and expiration date. This easy way of interacting with food is extremely new in our human history and may somehow blind us to the complexity of the task that is choosing appropriate foods to eat which have played a crucial role throughout human evolution, given food’s central importance for survival. In fact, choosing what to eat is a crucial and difficult task. Humans are omnivores and need to gather a wide variety of foods to ensure nutritional health and infants are born into a world replete with objects (either food or non-food) that have different colors, shapes, odors… A few common taste preferences - such as tendencies to like sweet and salty tastes and dislike sour and bitter tastes are evident very early in life and likely emerged to guide human learners toward substances that are both safe to eat and nutritious. However, these common taste preferences do not account for the complexity of the human diet. Given the broad possibility space of potential foods and risks (e.g., ingesting harmful entities) across different environments, infants and young children instead must learn what to eat over the course of development, going away from eating just milk after weaning. This food learning task is particularly complex given that children do not only need to learn about the safety and palatability of the different entities in their environment but also about who eats what food in what context, absorbing social and cultural traditions surrounding food selection, as eating is largely a social phenomenon. The objectives of the current project are to investigate in detail how infants and young children learn and choose what to eat, both individually and with the help of social partners. First, the project examines how young individuals learn to categorize which entities in their environment are candidate food items (Axis 1). Second, the project investigates the social learning mechanisms and attentional strategies young individuals use to avoid mistakes (i.e., ingesting something harmful) while learning what to eat (Axis 2). The strength of the project is in the combination of robust methods from neuroscience, cognitive and developmental psychology to conduct an innovative and interdisciplinary investigation of how humans learn and choose what to eat. Altogether, this research project enriches our understanding of the ontogenetic roots of human food cognition and eating behaviors, and pave a way toward designing evidence-based interventions for fostering healthy and sustainable eating especially in early life.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union