MIAM Team Thesis Offer

Context Learning what to eat is a crucial and difficult task. Humans are omnivores and need to gather a wide variety of foods to ensure nutritional health and well-being and infants are born into a world replete with objects that have different colors, shapes, odors... A few common taste preferences - such as tendencies to like sweet and salty tastes and dislike sour and bitter tastes - are evident very early in life and likely emerged to guide human learners toward substances that are both safe to eat and nutritious (Schwartz et al., 2009, Ustun et al., 2022). However, these common taste preferences do not account for the great complexity and diversity of human diets. Given the broad possibility space of potential foods and risks (e.g., ingesting harmful entities) across different environments, infants and young children instead must learn what to eat over the course of development, going away from eating just milk after weaning. This food learning task is particularly complex given that infants and young children do not only need to learn about the safety and palatability of the different entities in their environment but also about who eats what foods in what context, absorbing social and cultural traditions surrounding food selection, as eating is largely a social phenomenon. Given the complexity of the food learning task, it is simply neither possible nor risk-free for infants and young children to construct a diverse and nutritious diet using trial-and-error individual learning. In fact, research investigating food learning processes in early life highlights that food knowledge is largely acquired via social learning from more knowledgeable individuals, including observation, imitation and teaching, (e.g., Addessi et al., 2005; DeJesus et al., 2018). Notably, this work shows that observing what others eat is a particularly influential social cue (e.g., seeing an adult or an older peer eating an unfamiliar food increases children’s willingness to taste that food, Addessi et al., 2005).