NCT06108128

Food for Thought: Executive Functioning Around Eating Among Children

Characterizing Top-down Dimensions of Appetite Self-regulation Among Preschoolers

• Status: Recruiting
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 125 (estimated)
• Sponsor: Temple University · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 4 Years – 6 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

Scientific knowledge of the cognitive-developmental processes that serve to support children's appetite self-regulation are surprisingly limited. This investigation will provide new scientific directions for obesity prevention by elucidating cognitive-developmental influences on young children's ability to make healthy food choices and eat in moderation.

Detailed description

Appetite self-regulation (ASR) has been described as involving children's use of eating-specific, "top-down" cognitive processes to moderate "bottom-up" biological drives to eat. Much of the research to date on ASR has focused on the role of bottom-up drives in shaping children's behavioral susceptibility to obesity. Alternatively, little is known about the cognitive-developmental processes that shape children's ability to make healthy food choices and eat in moderation during early childhood. The goal of this exploratory investigation is to produce rigorous evidence of cognitive developmental influences on healthy eating behaviors and weight status during preschool through the development of new measures of top-down ASR. Participants will be 125 preschoolers and their primary caregiver. Existing measures of executive functioning in children will be adapted to create new measures of eating-specific, top-down ASR. Associations with children's eating behaviors, body mass index z-scores, food parenting will be assessed.

Conditions

• Self-regulation
• Appetitive Behavior
• Eating Behavior
• Child Obesity

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
OTHER	Executive functioning observational tasks	Interventions take place solely at the measurement level, where children will be seen in observational tasks of general executive functioning and executive functioning around eating in which various food and non-food stimuli are presented and children's responses to task instructions are recorded.

Timeline

• Start date: 2023-10-05
• Primary completion: 2025-12-31
• Completion: 2025-12-31
• First posted: 2023-10-30
• Last updated: 2025-04-10

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States