Implicit and explicit safety evaluation of foods: The importance of food processing

Coricelli, Carol; Rumiati, Raffaella I.; Rioux, Camille

doi:10.1016/j.appet.2022.106062

Cited by 7 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 91 publications

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“…In adults, previous work has shown that hunger level, dietary habits, and BMI could also explain differences in food categorization [e.g., ref. ( 76 )]. It might be informative to measure these individual characteristics alongside children’s food neophobia.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tears for pears: Influence of children’s neophobia on categorization performance and strategy in the food domain

2022

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Preschoolers’ neophobic dispositions mainly target fruits and vegetables. They received a great deal of attention in the past decades as these dispositions represent the main psychological barrier to dietary variety. Recently, children’s food neophobia has been found to be negatively correlated with their categorization performance (i.e., the accuracy to discriminate between food categories). We investigated categorization strategies among neophobic children, tendencies to favor one type of error over the other (misses over false alarms), in order to compensate for their poor categorization performance. To capture children’s categorization strategies, we used the Signal Detection Theory framework. A first experiment assessed 120 3-to-6-years old children’ sensitivity to discriminate between foods and nonfoods as well as their decision criterion (i.e., response strategy). In a second experiment, we manipulated the influence of food processing. The hypothesis was that food processing acts as a sign of human interventions that decreases uncertainty about edibility and thus promotes feelings of safety in the food domain. 137 children were tested on a food versus nonfood categorization task contrasting whole and sliced stimuli. In both experiments, increased levels of food neophobia were significantly associated with poorer categorization sensitivity and with a more conservative decision criterion (i.e., favoring “it is inedible” errors). Additionally, results from Experiment 2 revealed that food processing did not influence neophobic children, whereas their neophilic counterparts adopted a more liberal decision criterion for sliced stimuli than for whole stimuli. These findings are the first demonstration of a relationship between a decision criterion and food neophobia in young children. These results have strong implications for theories of food neophobia and laid the groundwork for designing novel types of food education interventions.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tears for pears: Influence of children’s neophobia on categorization performance and strategy in the food domain

2022

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“…They found that transformed food was remembered better by younger participants and seemed more resilient to brain damage than natural food in patients. Similarly, in a Go/No-Go association task testing the association between foods with different levels of processing and words related to safety (e.g., "pure", "harmless"), Coricelli et al (2022) found faster response times to processed than unprocessed foods. Finally, in an EEG study, Coricelli et al (2019) recorded visual evoked potentials (VEP) of healthy participants presented with images of processed and unprocessed foods equated in caloric content.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…Taken together, these findings suggest processed food is extremely important and processed food might be especially cognitively salient. Indeed, one interpretation of these findings is that transformed food is remembered better due to its caloric content, or because it lessens the chances of being poisoned or infected, which makes it crucial from a biological-evolutionary perspective (Carmody & Wrangham, 2009;Coricelli et al, 2022;. Along these lines, it might also be hypothesized that processed foods would be lexicalized differently to natural foods, given their importance to humans.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The semantic representation of food is shaped by cultural experience

María

Majid²

2023

Lang. cogn.

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While eating is universally salient, food habits vary greatly even across similar western cultural groups. Italians, for example, are renowned pasta consumers whereas this habit is less pervasive in other western cultures. This variability might shape the conceptualization of food of different cultural groups. Against this backdrop, it has been proposed the semantic representation of food is universally organized along two main axes, with natural food (e.g., vegetables, fruit) relying more on sensory properties and manufactured food (e.g., pasta) relying more on functional properties. In this exploratory study, we compared the semantic representation of pasta, vegetables, and fruit across Italian and English-speaking participants with a free-listing task. We find the representation of pasta is not restricted to functional properties. Moreover, Italian and English speakers differed both quantitatively and qualitatively in their representation of pasta. Italians produced more exemplars of pasta than English-speaking participants, and their conceptual organization of pasta also included fine-grained distinctions (e.g., egg-based vs. flour-and-water pasta), whereas English-speaking participants mostly focused on perceptual components (e.g., long) – even when accounting for differential consumption, cooking, and preparation experience of pasta. Our results suggest that culture-specific experiences can shape the conceptualization of food.

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“…For instance, the gain of energy when eating cooked starches, such as potatoes, is quantifiable between 12-35% (Carmody & Wrangham, 2009). In addition to being a ubiquitous part of food culture (Wrangham, 2009), processing often reduces the toxicity of raw foods and signals previous human intervention, which could act as cues of edibility and safety, two important features when evaluating potential food items (Coricelli et al, 2022;Foinant et al, 2021Foinant et al, , 2022Rioux & Wertz, 2021;Hesse & Knight, 2022).…”

Section: The Degree Of Processing Of Foodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

FEED your mind: The evolutionary roots of human food cognition

rioux¹,

Wertz²,

Rumiati³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Research on food cognition has overlooked that our modern food environment strongly differs from the environment in which our ancestors lived. In fact, in most cultures today, many decisions about food are made during a trip to the grocery store, where we might ask ourselves: Are these canned tomatoes healthy? but certainly not: Are they edible or toxic? In contrast, our ancestors had to navigate their natural environment to Find and Evaluate the beneficial foods in that environment, while Excluding the costs of consuming something harmful, and finally Decide which entities to eat. We call this the FEED problem and present an innovative perspective on food cognition. We argue that a focus on FEED can bridge the gap between different findings in the field of food cognition and shed a new light on the cognitive and brain mechanisms that drive our food behaviors. It has the potential to promote novel intervention strategies, at a time when the rise of food-related health and environmental challenges calls for action.

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Implicit and explicit safety evaluation of foods: The importance of food processing

Cited by 7 publications

References 91 publications

Tears for pears: Influence of children’s neophobia on categorization performance and strategy in the food domain

Tears for pears: Influence of children’s neophobia on categorization performance and strategy in the food domain

The semantic representation of food is shaped by cultural experience

FEED your mind: The evolutionary roots of human food cognition

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