Associations Among Food Delay of Gratification, Cognitive Measures, and Environment in a Community Preschool Sample

Abstract

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Much of the work on the development of appetite self-regulation in early childhood employs tasks assessing Delay of Gratification (DoG). While this skill is thought to rely on “cool” cognitive processes like effortful control, executive functioning, and self-regulation, demonstration of how laboratory measures of food DoG relate to common assessments of those cognitive processes in community samples of children is needed. This study presents secondary data investigating the associations between two laboratory tasks of food DoG, the Snack Delay and Tongue Tasks, and an array of laboratory and parent-report cognitive measures in a sample of 88 children ages 3-6 (M age = 4.05, SD = 0.76), as well as how four measures of the child's environment were associated with food DoG. Results indicated that both measures of food DoG were positively correlated with performance on the cognitive tasks, with stronger associations observed for the Tongue Task. Family income was positively associated with food DoG as measured by the Tongue Task, and child negative life events in the past year were negatively correlated with food DoG as measured by the Snack Delay Task. These findings present the pattern of associations between cognitive tasks and food DoG, the development of which may be meaningfully affected by specific aspects of family environment.

Keywords

• delay of gratification
• cognitive measures
• executive function
• preschool
• environment