Apprentissage social des comportements alimentaires chez les nourrissons et les jeunes enfants

Description du sujet de thèse :

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).

Objectives of the PhD project

A caveat in the line of work investigating social learning about food is that most of the studies have been conducted with children from 3 to 4 years of age and research with infants and toddlers remains particularly sparse. Yet, it is in the first years of life that we transition from exclusive breastfeeding to eating solid foods and introduce various new foods in our diet, making infancy a crucial period for food learning. Indeed, many food habits are acquired in early life and, in addition, have a large influence on dietary patterns later in life (Luque et al., 2018; Nicklaus et al., 2005). In that context, the overarching aim of the PhD project is to investigate in detail how infants and toddlers learn and choose what to eat, with the help of their social partners (e.g., caregivers, peers).

Specifically, we aim to examine:

(i) What kind of social information they use to learn what to eat.

(ii) From whom they learn best.

(iii) Whether social learning about food is selective, i.e., differs from learning processes in other domains (e.g., learning about objects).

Centre des Sciences du Goût et de l'alimentation à Dijon

Equipe MIAM – Comportement Alimentaire : plaisir, santé & durabilité

Notre équipe s’intéresse aux déterminants du comportement alimentaire liés aux aliments (propriétés sensorielles, nutritionnelles, informations…), aux mangeurs (statut pondéral, motivations…) et au contexte physique et social de la prise alimentaire. Sur la base de ces connaissances, nous développons et testons des stratégies pour accompagner les consommateurs vers une alimentation plus saine et plus durable. Nos travaux ciblent différentes populations :

- Développement précoce des préférences et du comportement alimentaire chez les nourrissons et les enfants

- Mécanismes cognitifs et représentations mentales sous-jacents aux choix alimentaires chez l’adulte

- Période de transition entre la fin de l’adolescence et le début de l’âge adulte (e.g., étudiants)

- Déterminants psychosociaux des comportements alimentaires durables chez des personnes en situation d’insécurité alimentaire

- Baisse d’appétit et troubles de l’alimentation chez les personnes âgées

Cette capacité à aborder des questions de recherche tout au long de la vie est un marqueur fort de notre travail, unique en France.

Profil recherché :
•Candidat.e avec un Master 2 de Psychologie, Science Cognitive ou similaire ou diplôme d’ingenieur.e Agro ;
•Candidat.e dynamique et motivé.e. La/le doctorant.e travaillera en contact direct avec les jeunes enfants invités aux expériences et leurs parents ;
•Bon niveau de français et d’anglais ;
•Une maitrise de logiciels d’analyse statistique/programmation type Matlab ou R est un plus.