DeJesus Jasmine M, Gelman Susan A, Lumeng Julie C
Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Department of Psychology, University of Michigan.
Cogn Dev. 2020 Apr-Jun;54. doi: 10.1016/j.cogdev.2020.100889. Epub 2020 May 15.
Assessing children's reasoning about food, including their health knowledge and their food preferences, is an important step toward understanding how health messages may influence children's food choices. However, in many studies, assessing children's reasoning relies on parent report or could be susceptible to social pressure from adults. To address these limitations, the present study describes the development of a food version of the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The IAT has been used to examine children's implicit stereotypes about social groups, yet few studies have used the IAT in other domains (such as food cognition). Four- to 12-year-olds ( = 123) completed the food IAT and an explicit card sort task, in which children assessed foods based on their perception of the food's healthfulness (healthy vs. unhealthy) and palatability (yummy vs. yucky). Surprisingly, children demonstrated positive implicit associations towards vegetables. This pattern may reflect children's health knowledge, given that the accuracy of children's healthfulness ratings in the card sort task positively predicted children's food IAT scores. Implications for both food cognition and the IAT are discussed.
评估儿童对食物的推理，包括他们的健康知识和食物偏好，是迈向理解健康信息如何影响儿童食物选择的重要一步。然而，在许多研究中，评估儿童的推理依赖于家长报告，或者可能容易受到来自成年人的社会压力影响。为了克服这些局限性，本研究描述了一种食物版内隐联想测验（IAT）的开发过程。IAT已被用于考察儿童对社会群体的内隐刻板印象，但很少有研究将IAT用于其他领域（如食物认知）。4至12岁的儿童（n = 123）完成了食物IAT和一项明确的卡片分类任务，在该任务中，儿童根据对食物健康程度（健康与不健康）和美味程度（好吃与难吃）的认知对食物进行评估。令人惊讶的是，儿童对蔬菜表现出积极的内隐联想。鉴于在卡片分类任务中儿童对健康程度评分的准确性能够正向预测儿童的食物IAT分数，这种模式可能反映了儿童的健康知识。本文还讨论了该研究对食物认知和IAT的启示。
