Explicit and implicit tasks for assessing hedonic-versus nutrition-based attitudes towards food in French children

Attitudes are important precursors of behaviours. This study aims to compare the food attitudes (i.e., hedonic- and nutrition-based) of children using both an implicit pairing task and an explicit forced-choice categorization task suitable for the cognitive abilities of 5- to 11-year-olds. A dominance of hedonically driven attitudes was expected for all ages in the pairing task, designed to elicit affective and spontaneous answers, whereas a progressive emergence of nutrition-based attitudes was expected in the categorization task, designed to involve deliberate analyses of the costs/benefits of foods. An additional exploratory goal was to evaluate differences in the attitudes of normal and…