Characterizing top-down dimensions of appetite self-regulation among preschoolers

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PROJECT SUMMARY Making healthy food choices and eating in moderation during early childhood are central to obesity prevention and are thought to require effortful and goal-directed self-regulation. 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. Current perspectives hold that ASR is distinct from general self-regulation (e.g., executive functioning [EF]) among children, highlighting the large gap in scientific understanding of cognitive developmental influences on healthy eating and obesity prevention during the preschool years. The goal of this R21 exploratory investigation is to produce rigorous evidence of cognitive developmental influences on healthy eating behaviors (i.e., healthy food choices, eating in moderation) and weight status during preschool through the development of new measures of top-down ASR. Preschool is an important period for studying top-down ASR given the significant socialization of eating behaviors and rapid maturation of top-down regulatory processes that occur during this period. Participants will be 150 preschoolers (75 with normal weight, 75 with overweight or obesity) and their primary caregiver. Given well- documented socioeconomic disparities in self-regulation, diet quality, obesity among children, we will oversample families with low-income backgrounds. We will adapt existing measures of inhibitory, working memory, and attention shifting–core aspects of EF – to develop new measures of eating-specific, top-down ASR. ASR/EF associations with laboratory-based observations of children’s eating behaviors, body mass index z-scores, and questionnaire-based measures of food parenting will be assessed. Aim 1 will adapt well- established objective observational measures of top-down EF to assess top-down ASR regulation among preschoolers. Aim 2 will examine the protective role of top-down ASR in making healthful food choices, eating in moderation, and weight status among preschoolers. Given that parenting represents a socialization pathway that can hinder or facilitate self-regulation in children, Aim 3 will evaluate associations of food parenting structure and autonomy support with top-down ASR among children. Raising children to make healthy food choices and eat in moderation in the current obesogenic environment may require more explicit involvement of cognitive-developmental processes around eating than has been previously appreciated. The findings of this investigation will yield novel scientific directions for obesity prevention by elucidating cognitive developmental influences on healthy food choices, eating in moderation, and weight status among preschoolers.