Abstract: Picky eating in children raises significant concerns about nutritional adequacy, which can lead to long-term health issues and necessitates early intervention. While research on picky eating has focused primarily on social and environmental factors, such as family dynamics, cultural influences, and peer interactions, the role of cognitive processes in the shaping of children’s eating habits has often been overlooked. This review, which involves a comprehensive retrospective analysis, was performed with the aim of elucidating how cognitive processes influence picky eating behaviors in children and the underlying mechanisms driving these effects.
Currently, the academic community has different perceptions and understandings of the connotations of the concept of picky eating and has yet to form a unified definition. As a consequence, a consensus on the appropriate measures for assessing picky eating is lacking. By conducting a thorough review of the literature, we systematically categorize three key characteristics of picky eating: a lack of dietary diversity, a rejection of unfamiliar foods (food neophobia), and potential long-term negative impacts on both physical health and social interactions. Importantly, a lack of dietary diversity and food neophobia can occur together, but either characteristic may also appear independently. Tools for measuring picky eating in children can be broadly classified into two categories. The first involves assessing picky eating behaviors via relevant questions from established questionnaires that have been tested for reliability and validity, whereas the second uses self-developed questions to evaluate these behaviors. Picky eating behaviors typically peak in early childhood, around the age of five, before gradually diminishing in most children. We propose that the developmental trajectory of children's picky eating behaviors is shaped not only by physiology, self-concept development, and food experiences but also by cognitive abilities such as perception and mental representation.
We then further investigated the main focus of this review. Our findings reveal that children's sensory sensitivity to food, cognitive representations of food, sensitivity to punishments, and information processing biases all influence their picky eating tendencies. Specifically, first, children with high sensory sensitivity have lower sensory thresholds, making them more likely to avoid foods that evoke unpleasant experiences, thereby contributing to their picky eating behaviors. Second, children who respond well to positive reinforcement may be more inclined to try new foods as they associate them with rewards. Conversely, those who are more attuned to negative feedback might become increasingly resistant to unfamiliar foods as they perceive them as being undesirable or unappealing. Third, children who struggle to form abstract representations of food may find it more difficult to accurately identify different foods and have less precise expectations of their flavors. Consequently, they are more likely to reject novel foods and display pickiness during meals. Finally, attention to negative information about food, along with a tendency to interpret ambiguous food-related information negatively, may exacerbate children's picky eating behaviors.
On the basis of the existing research, this review suggests several future research directions. First, subsequent studies should explore the roles of more sensory processes and the cross-modal integration of diverse sensory information with regard to children's eating behaviors. The existing studies have typically explored the relationships between a single sensory characteristic, such as touch, smell, or taste, and children's picky eating behaviors. However, food experiences are a multisensory process that often involves the combined effects of multiple senses rather than just one. Cross-modal integration refers to how different sensory modalities (such as sight, smell, and taste) interact and influence eating behavior. Understanding these interactions can offer valuable insights into how to present foods in a more appealing manner to encourage acceptance among children. Second, further research is needed to explore the impact of information processing biases on children's picky eating behaviors. Third, given the close relationship between cognitive factors and picky eating, future intervention studies targeting picky eating should consider the cognitive factors associated with this behavior. This may involve manipulating various food sensory traits to increase food intake, considering the role of sensory sensitivity in the effectiveness of parental feeding practices, and examining how sensitivity to rewards and punishments influences the selection of intervention strategies. Additionally, cognitive bias modification and educational interventions should be incorporated to address and change children's information processing biases related to food.
In conclusion, this review provides a comprehensive overview of the cognitive mechanisms underlying picky eating in children, emphasizing the cognitive factors involved and suggesting directions for future research. By doing so, we can gain deeper insight into picky eating and help children build positive associations with a diverse range of foods, ultimately promoting balanced and healthy eating habits that support their growth and development.

Key words: picky eating, food neophobia, children, cognitive processes