UCI Study: Kids Pick Broccoli Over Cake -- If Asked The Right Way

ORANGE COUNTY, CA -- If you ask a child under the age of 3 whether they want cake or broccoli, eight times out of 10 the answer will be broccoli, according to the results of a study recently conducted at the University of California, Irvine.

But the toddlers' answer won't necessarily be because they prefer leafy greens over sugary sweets; it's due to order in which the choices are presented.

A study led by the University of California, Irvine and published in the online journal PLOS One has found that toddlers are highly subject to “recency bias” when faced with “or” questions: They tend to pick the last option, even if it’s not what they actually want.

“Adults are able to distinguish between choices and are oftentimes more likely to select the first one. This is called primacy bias,” the study’s lead author, Emily Sumner, a UCI doctoral candidate in cognitive sciences, explained. “But kids, particularly toddlers under 3, who may not know language as well, demonstrate a recency bias when responding to questions verbally, meaning the last choice presented is more often selected. This area hasn’t been studied in children before, so this is fascinating to pinpoint.”

Researchers asked 24 toddlers between 21 and 27 months old 20 questions in which they had to choose between option 1 and option 2. They then posed the same questions again, with the options in reverse order. After speaking each answer, the children were given a sticker depicting their selection. If they didn’t say which option they wanted, both stickers were shown when the question was asked, and they pointed to their choice.

When toddlers responded verbally, they picked the last option presented 85.2 percent of the time. When pointing rather than speaking, they chose the last option only 51.6 percent 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.

“When a child is pointing, they can see the options and choose their actual preference,” Sumner explained. “When they have no visual references and only hear ‘or,’ they’re able to hold onto the most recently mentioned option by depending on the phonological loop. The children understand how speech sounds but not necessarily what the words mean. So when speaking, they’re just parroting back the most recently mentioned choice.”