FEED your mind: Investigating the nature, ontogeny and evolution of cognitive processes underlying food behaviors, to pave a way toward efficient interventions promoting healthy eating in early life

The rise of food-related health disorders calls for action. Food behaviors take shape early in life and track well into adulthood.

Thus, efficient evidence-based interventions promoting healthy food practices in early life are key to tackling these challenges.

The aim of the project is to shed light on the cognitive processes underlying food learning in infancy and provide empirical bases to design such interventions.The project adopts a novel perspective on food learning.

Current research has overlooked that our modern food environment strongly differs from the environment in which our ancestors lived.

In fact, in most cultures today, 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?.

As a result, scholars missed that a critical step in learning what to eat over the course of ontogeny, is determining which entities in the world are wholesome foods and which ones are harmful items to eschew. The project will fill this research gap using robust methods from neuroscience and psychology.

First, WP1 will investigate the ontogeny and neuro-cognitive bases of the capacity to recognize food objects, testing whether this capacity emerges when infants transition to solid food, guiding their attention to food-relevant inputs, such as social information about edibility.

Second, WP2 will examine the social component of food learning processes, once infants are able to recognize food objects, testing whether infants show a negativity bias when learning about food from others, giving more weight to negative than to positive information.

Finally, building on WP1 and WP2 results, WP3 will investigate the longitudinal relationship between the processes underlying food recognition and learning in infancy and food behaviors later in childhood, paving a way towards designing efficient evidence-based interventions promoting healthy eating in early life.