Generics have been presented as a window onto children’s concepts. Studies have documented the facilitating effect of generics on inductive reasoning in children, particularly, that this effect is sensitive to both age and domain of knowledge (natural kinds vs artifacts). The present study builds on Gelman (2002) who compared how 3 to 5 years old children generalized novel properties about familiar categories, contrasting the use of generics or specific quantifiers. We also expand Gelman’s work by measuring interindividual variability and by disentangling the respective influence of conceptual development and quantifiers understanding on induction performance. We enriched Gelman’s materials with food stimuli. Crucially, we measured food neophobia disposition to determine if the later interferes with the facilitation effect of generics on induction, as previous work has consistently shown that food neophobia interferes with conceptual development in the food domain (Rioux et al., 2017). We also added a quantifier understanding task adapted from (Gelman et al., 2016) to determine whether neophobic children’s hypothesized poor performance in the task resulted from an immature conceptual system about food and/or because they simply failed to understand the quantifiers. Results obtained shed light on the psychological barriers to the development of food literacy in children which is of crucial importance for dietary variety and children’s cognitive and physical development.

Authors:

Sabrina Boulkour: Université de Bourgogne; Jean-Pierre Thibaut: University of Bourgogne Franche-Comté; Lafraire Jérémie: Institut Paul Bocuse