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Foods represent important stimuli for humans, especially for human children. After weaning, it is important that children quickly acquire knowledge about their food environment to avoid ingesting potentially dangerous substances. This paper discusses this process and its implications in terms of schemas, a construct that social psychologists use to talk about people's knowledge about the stimuli in their environments(1). Schemas are cognitive structures that represent organized knowledge about a given type or category of stimulus. Individuals have schemas about all kinds of stimuli. Social psychologists are most interested in social schemas, those referring to people (e.g., university professors, Englishmen, women); however, schemas can also be about other concepts (e.g., furniture), or even about events (e.g., meals). Included in the content of a schema are individuals' basic knowledge and impressions - their ideas about the features that characterize stimuli in that particular category. For example, one's schema about university professors might include the information that they are bookish, methodical, verbose, and badly-dressed. A meal schema might include the notions that a meal involves taking of food while sitting down, the use of dishes and utensils, heating of the food, a particular order of courses(2,3). There is considerable research indicating that both children and adults use schemas in processing information and that such schemas can affect reactions to previously unencountered members of a category of stimuli. If one meets a new university professor, his or her schema leads to particular expectations about what this person is going to be like, and these expectations are likely to affect one's behavior toward this person. In this paper, we explore the implications of the idea that people have schemas about novel foods.
In order to understand the content of children's schemas about novel foods, we offered them a series of such foods(4). Then we questioned the children about the foods they had rejected, asking "How come you didn't want to taste the ______?" The children's responses revealed negative evaluations of these foods, based on their appearance ("it looks yucky," "it looks like liver," "it looks like barf," "it looks rotten") and negative expectations about their taste ("I don't like it,"...