Eat your vegetables: Exploring food learning cues in 12-month-old infants

Food learning in early life largely relies on social learning. Previous research has shown that infants learn something is edible when they directly observe someone else eating it. However, the role of other forms of food-related social information remains largely unknown. Food processing actions (e.g., chopping, mashing) are essential components of human food behaviors and a ubiquitous part of infants’ everyday lives. Here we examined whether infants (i) differentially attend to eating and food processing actions compared to control actions and (ii) learn that novel foods are edible after observing eating and food processing actions performed with them. We tested 12-month-olds’ responses to three different actions: eating, food processing, and a control action (touch). First, we showed infants side-by-side videos of an adult performing two different actions with novel foods across three between-subjects conditions and measured their gaze and pupil dilation with an eye-tracker. Then, we offered infants the novel foods shown in the videos and measured their choices and eating behaviors. Our eye-tracking results indicate that infants differentially attend to eating and food processing actions relative to the control action, and show increased pupil dilation for the control action relative to the two actions that may indicate edibility (eating and cutting). When asked to choose which novel food they could eat, infants chose the novel food they saw an actor eat, but only when that eating action was paired with the control action. These findings help identify important mechanisms that increase acceptance of healthy foods early in life.