The role of experience in children's food acceptance patterns

Results of studies conducted over the past ten years at the University of Illinois have shown that experience plays a major role in children's food acceptance patterns. Four aspects of experience with food and eating have been found to affect early food acceptance patterns: (1) the frequency of exposure to food; (2) associative conditioning of food cues to physiological consequences of eating; (3) associative conditioning of food cues to social context of feeding; and (4) learning more about which cues--physiological,environmental, cognitive--are relevant in the initiation, maintenance, and termination of eating. In addition, the quality of the social context of feeding has been shown to affect food acceptance and the extent to which children are attuned to cues of hunger and satiety in self-regulating food intake.