What are the cognitive processes that guide young children’s ability to develop healthy eating habits? Are they the same “executive functions” that help children plan, focus their attention, and regulate their behavior in other domains, such as in social interactions and at school? Or does eating engage a unique set of cognitive processes?
Jennifer Orlet Fisher, professor in the College of Public Health’s Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, will explore this question with new funding from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, a unit of the National Institutes of Health. "We hypothesize, and others have suggested, that executive functioning around eating is distinct from executive functioning skills that children use to, say, complete schoolwork,” she says. The findings of her two-year-study ultimately could shape approaches to child nutrition and obesity.
Much of the work on eating behavior has focused on what researchers refer to as “bottom-up” biologically-driven predispositions involving food avoidance and, alternatively, food motivation. While “top-down” cognitive processes that balance those drives are thought to play an important role in appetite self-regulation among children, those processes have not been elucidated. “We're in new territory,” Fisher says of the interest in studying executive functioning around eating. Fisher is collaborating on the study with Sheryl Hughes, a developmental psychologist who studies caregiver feeding styles at Baylor College of Medicine, and David Bridgett, a clinical psychologist who studies executive functioning among children at Northern Illinois University.
The grant further highlights Fisher’s growing national profile for her work to understand how early eating environments influence child behavioral controls of food intake and health outcomes. Fisher, who is associate director of Temple’s Center for Obesity Research and Education and directs its Family Eating Laboratory, recently was selected to serve on the federal dietary guidelines advisory committee which brings together the most up-to-date science to inform the US Dietary Guidelines, which are the cornerstone of federal food policy and set to be reissued in 2025. In 2021, she co-chaired the national Healthy Eating Research panel, a program that published science-backed guidelines to help parents and caregivers instill healthy eating behaviors among children ages 2 to 8.
The new study, which will include short sessions with 5-year-olds, will adapt a number of classic tasks for assessing inhibitory control, working memory, and attention-shifting dimensions of executive functioning to involve eating. One of those well-known classic measures of inhibitory control is the “Day/Night” task, in which children are told to say “day” when shown a picture of the moon and “night” when they are shown a picture of the sun. The task measures a child’s ability to inhibit an automatic response in favor of a suggested alternative. In the eating version of the task, children will be told to say “carrot” when shown a picture of a cupcake, and “cupcake” when shown a picture of a carrot. Children who execute these instructions with greater success will be viewed as having greater inhibitory control around eating.
“Inhibiting impulses towards highly palatable foods is a requisite skill for learning how to make healthy food choices.” Fisher says. “We anticipate that children who are highly food motivated may exhibit lower levels of executive functioning around eating.” The researchers will use parental questionnaires to match results of the assessments with parents’ evaluations of the children’s eating temperaments.
"This study aims to develop and conduct preliminary tests of these new measures, so we can begin to understand whether executive functioning around eating differs from general cognitive functioning and whether the two differ for some kids more than others,” Fisher says. In other areas of executive functioning there, she notes, interventions exist to support positive developmental outcomes such as school performance and social relationships. “We know that kids have innate biological predispositions around food approach and food avoidance, but many will go on to learn to make healthy choices. The question is what cognitive skills support that development and how can those skills be nurtured?”