I don't like it; I never tried it: Effects of exposure on two-year-old children's food preferences

The relationship between frequency of exposure to foods and preference for those foods was investigated in two experiments. Participants in both studies were two-year-old children. In Experiment 1, each of six children received 20, 15, 10, 5 or 2 exposures of five initially novel cheeses during a 26-day series of familiarization trials in which one pair of foods was presented per day. In Experiment 2, eight children received 20, 15, 10, 5 and 0 exposures to five initially novel fruits, following the same familiarization procedures, for 25 days. The particular food assigned to an exposure frequency was counterbalanced over subjects. Initial novelty was ascertained through food history information. Within ten days after the familiarization trials, children were given ten choice trials, comprising all possible pairs of the five foods. Thurstone scaling solutions were obtained for the series of choices: when the resulting scale values for the five stimuli were correlated with exposure frequency, values of r = 0·95, p < 0·02; r = 0·97, p < 0·01; and r = 0·94, p < 0·02 were obtained for the data of Experiments 1, 2, and the combined sample, respectively. A second analysis, employing subjects rather than stimuli as degrees of freedom, revealed that 13 of 14 subjects chose the more familiar stimulus in the sequence of ten choice trials at greater than the level expected by chance, providing evidence for effects within subjects as well as consistency across subjects. These results indicate that preference is an increasing function of exposure frequency. The data are consistent with the mere exposure hypothesis (Zajonc, 1968) as well as with the literature on the role of neophobia in food selection of animals other than man.