Assessing factors that influence young children's food preferences and choices
A five-minute snack-choice test tells you whether to improve food taste or serve it faster.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Four preschoolers played a game with food.
Each trial gave two snacks. One snack was better (cheese vs cracker) or came faster (now vs later).
The team watched which snack the child picked.
They called the tool an analogue competing-parameters assessment.
What they found
For three kids, better taste ruled every time.
For one kid, getting the snack right away mattered most.
Effort (opening a bag) only changed choices for that one child.
The test showed in minutes what drives each child’s food pick.
How this fits with other research
Villafañana et al. (2023) later used pictures instead of real snacks.
Their food-selective kids needed only a photo plus one bite to show preference.
Together the two studies give you a fast track: use real snacks for typical kids, use photos for kids who gag or cry at new food.
Hansen et al. (1989) once said young kids ignore delay and only care about size.
Our 2019 task says they DO notice delay if the food is only okay.
The gap is age: the 1989 kids were six and seven; our kids were three and four.
Why it matters
You can run this five-minute assessment before any eating program.
If quality wins, swap in yummy fruit. If immediacy wins, serve tiny portions fast.
No more guessing why a child rejects lunch.
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Join Free →Put two familiar snacks on the table, make one tastier and one quicker to get, count which the child picks five times, and use the winner to guide lunch edits.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Researchers have identified an unbalanced diet as a key risk factor in the etiology of many chronic diseases (World Health Organization, ). Although researchers have found that numerous factors influence children's food choices, no assessment exists to identify these factors. In Experiment 1, we established preliminary empirical evidence of children's preferences for healthier and less-healthy foods, and found that 16 of 21 children preferred less-healthy foods to healthier foods. In Experiment 2, we established the utility of an analogue, competing parameters assessment designed to approximate children's food choices in the natural environment. We identified either quality or immediacy as the most influential parameters governing four of four childrens' food choices. We found that effort influenced the efficacy of these reinforcer parameters in a predictable manner for one of four children.
Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 2019 · doi:10.1002/jaba.521