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Context

Learning what to eat is a crucial and difficult task. Humans are omnivores and need to gather a wide variety of foods to ensure nutritional health and well-being and infants are born into a world replete with objects that have different colors, shapes, odors... A few common taste preferences - such as tendencies to like sweet and salty tastes and dislike sour and bitter tastes - are evident very early in life and likely emerged to guide human learners toward substances that are both safe to eat and nutritious (Schwartz et al., , Ustun et al., ). However, these common taste preferences do not account for the great complexity and diversity of human diets. Given the broad possibility space of potential foods and risks (e.g., ingesting harmful entities) across different environments, infants and young children instead must learn what to eat over the course of development, going away from eating just milk after weanin...