Assessing children's reasoning about food, including their health knowledge and their food preferences, is an important step toward understanding how health messages may influence children's food choices. However, in many studies, assessing children's reasoning relies on parent report or could be susceptible to social pressure from adults. To address these limitations, the present study describes the development of a food version of the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The IAT has been used to examine children's implicit stereotypes about social groups, yet few studies have used the IAT in other domains (such as food cognition). Four- to 12-year-olds (n = 123) completed the food IAT and an explicit card sort task, in which children assessed foods based on their perception of the food's healthfulness (healthy vs. unhealthy) and palatability (yummy vs. yucky). Surprisingly, children demonstrated positive implicit associations towards vegetables. This pattern may reflect children's health knowledge, given that the accuracy of children's healthfulness ratings in the card sort task positively predicted children's food IAT d-scores. Implications for both food cognition and the IAT are discussed.

中文翻译：

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儿童内隐食物认知：开发食物内隐联想测验

评估儿童对食物的推理，包括他们的健康知识和食物偏好，是了解健康信息如何影响儿童食物选择的重要一步。然而，在许多研究中，评估儿童的推理依赖于父母的报告，或者可能容易受到成年人的社会压力。为了解决这些限制，本研究描述了隐式关联测试 (IAT) 的食品版本的开发。IAT 已被用于检查儿童对社会群体的内隐刻板印象，但很少有研究将 IAT 用于其他领域（如食物认知）。4 至 12 岁的儿童 (n = 123) 完成了食物 IAT 和明确的卡片分类任务，其中儿童根据他们对食物健康的看法（健康与健康）来评估食物。不健康）和适口性（美味与难吃）。令人惊讶的是，孩子们对蔬菜表现出积极的隐性联想。这种模式可能反映了儿童的健康知识，因为卡片分类任务中儿童健康评级的准确性正向预测儿童的食物 IAT d 分数。讨论了对食物认知和 IAT 的影响。