If asked the right way, children will choose broccoli rather than cake, according to a study

"Do you want a cake or broccoli?" If you ask a child under 3, the answer will be broccoli eight times out of ten.

But this has less to do with parents who have succeeded in instilling healthy food preferences than the order in which the choices are presented. A study conducted by the University of California, Irvine and published in the online journal PLOS One found that toddlers are highly subject to "recency bias" when they are confronted with "or" questions: they tend to choose the last option, even if it is not what They really want to.

"Adults are able to distinguish between choices and are often more likely to choose the first one.This is called primacy bias," said Emily Sumner, lead author of the study. , doctoral candidate in cognitive science. "But children, especially toddlers younger than 3 years old, who may be unfamiliar with the language, exhibit a recency bias by answering questions orally, which means that the last choice presented is more often selected. This area has never been studied is fascinating to identify. "

The researchers asked 20 toddlers aged 21 to 27 months 20 questions in which they had to choose between options 1 and 2. They then asked again the same questions, the options being reversed. After responding to each response, the children received a sticker describing their choice. If they did not say which option they wanted, both stickers were visible when the question was asked and they indicated their choice.

When toddlers responded verbally, they chose the last option presented 85.2% of the time. Pointing rather than speaking, they chose the last option only 51.6% of the time. According to Sumner, this difference is related to the development of children's working memory, which is concerned with immediate conscious perception and linguistic processing, as well as what is called the phonological loop.

"When a child points, he can see the options and choose his actual preference," she said. "When they do not have visual references and only hear" or ", they are able to retain the most recently mentioned option according to the phonological loop." Children understand how speech works sounds, but not necessarily what the words mean, they just pick up the last mentioned choice. "

The researchers also examined the child language data exchange system, a computerized database of conversations transcribed between parents and their children, to determine if the same bias applies to interactions in the child's home. real world. They analyzed 534 "or" questions and found that the probability of responding with the second option decreased with the aging of the children. 2-year-olds chose it in 64% of cases, while children aged 3 and 4 chose the second option in 50% of cases. This suggests that the recency bias is present until the age of about 3 years.

Additional experiments were conducted with 24 preschool children to determine if working memory constraints, such as age and word length, lead to a recency bias. Children were asked to name toy cartoon characters by choosing between two nonsense words whose number of syllables varied – Stog or Meeb, for example, or Hootamawhirl or Haykidosi.

The researchers found that most preschool children were likely to exhibit a recency bias throughout the process. Other results showed that with most children, the higher the number of syllables, the greater the recency bias. This suggests that when working memory is limited, even older children are more likely to return to the recency bias.

"Our study demonstrates the importance of swapping the order of options when you question your kids about their preferences because they do not always know what they are saying," Sumner said. "For experimental psychologists, research methods that require verbal responses must be carefully counterbalanced.However, parents may wish to use this type of skewed design when they ask the toddlers if they want a cake." or broccoli. "