Can I eat that too? 18-month-olds generalize social information about edibility to similar looking plants.

Learning what to eat is a critical problem that humans must solve over the course of ontogeny. Recent research underscores the importance of social learning processes to the development of food preferences in infancy and early childhood, but research investigating how (and whether) learned edibility information is generalized remains inconclusive. Here we investigate whether 18-month-olds generalize socially learned information about plant edibility. Across two experiments, infants watched an adult eat fruit from one type of plant and then were presented with a choice between two new plants: one was the same type of plant the adult had eaten from, and the other was a different type of plant. Infants' reaching and eating behavior was assessed during the choice phase. The results showed that 18-month-olds generalize edibility to the same type of plant. These findings provide new insights into the nature of human food learning processes early in development.