Bailey Immel presents poster at Cognitive Development Society conference

Bailey Immel presents poster at Cognitive Development Society conference

Over the past few years with Graduate Student Shreya Sodhi, we have conducted a study looking at what children expect people from the United States and other countries to eat. We find that children generally match familiar foods such as pancakes with people from the US, and unfamiliar foods such as mbeju with people from Vanuatu (an unfamiliar country). Further, when we gave them a third option of rating who would eat non-food items, such as hair, we found that children did not think that people from either country would eat these. Therefore, children seem to have an idea about the cultural connection between food and nationality and expect people from unfamiliar countries to eat unfamiliar foods but not any type of item. We are currently writing up this study to be part of a manuscript to be published soon.