GREEN MINDS: KNOWLEDGE-BASED STRATEGIES FOR THE ADOPTION OF A PLANT-BASED DIET IN 3-6 Y.O. CHILDREN
type: CreativeWork
description: This dissertation deals with how to design new knowledge-based educational programs that can help young (3- to 6-year-old) children in overcoming food neophobia, which is a disposition to reject unfamiliar food even before tasting it (Dovey et al. 2008) and constitutes a major hindrance to the adoption of healthy and sustainable eating habits during the developmental phase in which food preferences first take shape. Recent studies have in fact found correlations between poorer performance in cognitive tasks tapping into conceptual food knowledge (e.g., food categorization and property inference) and higher scores on the Child Food Rejection Scale (Rioux et al., 2017) among preschool children (Lafraire et al., 2016; Rioux et al., 2018; Pickard et al., 2021; Foinant et al., 2022), thus suggesting that children’s food concepts play an important role in determining their food behavior. Anyways, the educational potential of this connection is still unaddressed in the literature. The General Introduction outlining the general topics of this work, some key terms, and the methodological approach I’ve attended throughout this research project is followed by three research papers, which constitute the bulk of the dissertation. The first one is a literature review, whose aim is that of clarifying the notion of “conceptual food knowledge” in the light of extant experimental research on young children’s food cognition. Conceptual food knowledge in this population can be unpacked into a more fine-grained typology encompassing three main subtypes of knowledge that most children proved capable of mastering by the sixth year of life: taxonomic knowledge, which hinges on set-inclusion relations among food categories, relations knowledge, which involves contextual thematic and script relationships between food items and events, and value-laden knowledge, which encompasses evaluative and ad-hoc food knowledge. This typology is the first one of this kind in the literature and highlights…
abstract: This dissertation deals with how to design new knowledge-based educational programs that can help young (3- to 6-year-old) children in overcoming food neophobia, which is a disposition to reject unfamiliar food even before tasting it (Dovey et al. 2008) and constitutes a major hindrance to the adoption of healthy and sustainable eating habits during the developmental phase in which food preferences first take shape. Recent studies have in fact found correlations between poorer performance in cognitive tasks tapping into conceptual food knowledge (e.g., food categorization and property inference) and higher scores on the Child Food Rejection Scale (Rioux et al., 2017) among preschool children (Lafraire et al., 2016; Rioux et al., 2018; Pickard et al., 2021; Foinant et al., 2022), thus suggesting that children’s food concepts play an important role in determining their food behavior. Anyways, the educational potential of this connection is still unaddressed in the literature. The General Introduction outlining the general topics of this work, some key terms, and the methodological approach I’ve attended throughout this research project is followed by three research papers, which constitute the bulk of the dissertation. The first one is a literature review, whose aim is that of clarifying the notion of “conceptual food knowledge” in the light of extant experimental research on young children’s food cognition. Conceptual food knowledge in this population can be unpacked into a more fine-grained typology encompassing three main subtypes of knowledge that most children proved capable of mastering by the sixth year of life: taxonomic knowledge, which hinges on set-inclusion relations among food categories, relations knowledge, which involves contextual thematic and script relationships between food items and events, and value-laden knowledge, which encompasses evaluative and ad-hoc food knowledge. This typology is the first one of this kind in the literature and highlights…
author: GANDOLINI, MATTEO
language: eng
keywords: food concept, food neophobia, philosophy, preschool education, conceptual pluralism, young children, Settore PHIL-04/B - Filosofia e teoria dei linguaggi, Settore PSIC-02/A - Psicologia dello sviluppo e dell'educazione
date published: 2025-06-09
date modified: 2026-07-27T20:19:10Z
provider: Università degli Studi di Milano
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Università degli Studi di Milano

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: https://hdl.handle.net/2434/1167295

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.13130/gandolini-matteo_phd2025-06-09