Show or tell: Children's learning about food from action vs verbal testimony

Abstract

Summary Background Childhood obesity continues to be a critical health concern in the United States. Nonetheless, interventions that focus on delivering verbal lessons about food and health to children in preschool classrooms have had only modest effects. Objectives The present study examines the relative effectiveness of showing vs telling children about food to promote healthy eating, with a focus on unfamiliar foods and vegetables. Methods Three‐ to six‐year‐old children (n = 71) were tested in a laboratory study in which they watched videos of two people eating apple‐broccoli puree. One person took five bites of the food; the other said they liked the food. Results Children did not differentiate between the food they saw someone eat and the food they heard someone talk about. Children's food intake was negatively associated with parent reports of children's eating behavior on the Food Fussiness subscale of the Child Eating Behavior Questionnaire. We found similar patterns in an analogous toy task. In an unfamiliar object task, children selected the action demonstration as the right way to use the object. Conclusions We find no evidence that action vs verbal testimony is more persuasive in guiding children's food choices, but action testimony may be persuasive in other domains. The associations between children's food intake and pickiness provide growing evidence of alignment between parent assessments of their children's typical eating behavior and children's food choices in laboratory studies.

Overheard and understood: A systematic review of children’s learning from overhearing.

“…Previous research has shown that children learn a great deal from direct communication (DeJesus & Venkatesh, 2020; Harris & Koenig, 2006; Harris et al, 2018; Heyman & Gelman, 1999; Rhodes, 2012; Stephens & Koenig, 2015). However, children also learn from observations of other people’s interactions.…”

Studying Children’s Eating at Home: Using Synchronous Videoconference Sessions to Adapt to COVID-19 and Beyond

“…In a comprehensive review on experimental studies that seek to change children's eating behavior, 29 of the 120 studies reviewed used weighed food intake as a dependent variable (among other common outcomes, such as food preferences or choices which will be described in the upcoming sections), specifically for studies that sought to increase children's fruit and vegetable intake (see DeCosta et al, 2017 for review). Many of our own studies take this approach, including studies that examine how social knowledge of the food influences children's food intake (DeJesus et al, 2018b), whether children eat more food if they assisted in preparing the food (DeJesus et al, 2019a), how maternal talk and intake of food relates to children's intake of those foods (DeJesus et al, 2018a), and whether children learn about food by verbal testimony or by seeing someone eat that food (DeJesus and Venkatesh, 2020). When this in-person interaction is not possible, it is harder for researchers to use pre-post weight measurements as a standardized measure of food intake given the access to and variability of weighing scales that families may have at home.…”