Children's taste perception and cognitive development

Finistrella, Viviana; Morino, Giuseppe; Curcio, Giuseppe; Manco, Melania

doi:10.1038/ijo.2011.166

Cited by 2 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…During testing, the children were asked to place the cups with "magic water" on a placemat with a fairy. The children always started with the pair with the strongest dilution, but the serving order within pairs was randomized, as children can be prone to position bias (Finistrella, Morino, Curcio, & Manco, 2012). The first outcomes of the pre-study indicated that under this protocol, the children were engaged in the test and rate fulfilling the test was high.…”

Section: Sensitivity Testmentioning

confidence: 99%

The magic water test. An affective paired comparison approach to evaluate taste sensitivity in pre-schoolers

Vennerød

Hersleth

Nicklaus

et al. 2017

Food Quality and Preference

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Children in pre-school age present a limited cognitive development, a restricted vocabulary and a short attention span, which do not allow conducting classical taste sensitivity measures as developed for adults. The aim of this study was to develop and validate an age-appropriate protocol for sensitivity testing of the five basic tastes with pre-schoolers. One hundred and forty children aged 3–4 years (mean age 46.3 months, SD 3.4) performed a paired comparison task consisting of discriminating water from ‘‘magic water” by relying on their affect. In order to accommodate the age group, the task was gamified and did not require verbal responses. Sweet (sucrose, ranging from 0.94 to 4.32 g/l), sour (citric acid monohy- drate, 0.20–0.38 g/l), umami (monosodium glutamate, 0.17–0.49 g/l), salty (sodium chloride, 0.34– 0.98 g/l), and bitter (quinine hydrochloride dihydrate, 0.0014–0.0038 g/l) water dilutions were tested at four levels. Subsets of about 20 children per taste participated in retest sessions. Individual sensitivity scores were derived in two manners, following the experimenter’s success criterion (water with taste is classified as magic) and the child’s criterion for ‘‘magic water” (children’s individual magic-labelling strategies). Results show that the protocol was highly engaging, that the children performed the task consistently, and that the children’s performances were not dependent on cognitive level differences, thus validating the protocol for this study. On average, the children were clearly more sensitive to sour stimuli than to sweet and bitter stimuli, suggesting that the selected dilutions were not equivalent across tastes. Different sensitivity distributions of the children were obtained across taste modalities and scoring cri- teria. The key elements of an age-appropriate protocol for pre-schoolers are discussed

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Section: Sensitivity Testmentioning

confidence: 99%

The magic water test. An affective paired comparison approach to evaluate taste sensitivity in pre-schoolers

Vennerød

Hersleth

Nicklaus

et al. 2017

Food Quality and Preference

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Finistrella et al 1 recommend that children with problems in visuospatial and/or motor skills should not be included in sensory testing. We agree with that remark.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The limiting factor is the size of a child's hand, rather than a motoric impairment. 2 Finistrella et al 1 also recommended that stimuli should be randomly placed to avoid bias due to spatial layout. For the threshold test, it is not possible to arrange the stimuli at random, because we have to avoid adaptation.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%