Policy in perspective: Assessing the relationship between malnourishment in children and school meal legislation since the early 20th Century

Malnourishment in children has been a cause of governmental concern for over a century. However, the nature of malnourishment has shifted during the 20th Century. Around the time of the Boer War there were concerns that children were not receiving sufficient nutrition which caused under-nourishment whereas today the concern is related to the opposite end of the malnourishment spectrum with increasing numbers of children suffering from over-nourishment. In the early 20th Century the government introduced legislation to allow Local Education Authorities to provide school meals to under-nourished children in order to prevent associated malaise and allow them to benefit from the education they were receiving. School meal legislation has been altered and amended over the course of a century to shape our children’s bodies and minds. This thesis analyses whether government policies for school meals have, since their introduction in 1906 in England, had a genuine impact (either positive or negative) on observed, longitudinal changes in childhood nutrition. The thesis assesses a series of cross-sectional data for children’s height and weight collected in the UK from 1908 to the present in order to estimate changes in malnutrition (including underweight, overweight, and obesity) for UK children. This quantitative analysis is contextualised with qualitative data on the development of legislation relating to school meals and interviews/focus groups with school cooks in an attempt to identify potential relationships. The thesis discusses observed fluctuations in the nutritional status of children in relation to the changes in government legislation on school meals and contextualises the findings with the wider literature. The findings suggest that fluctuations in child malnourishment are not easily attributed to changes in one category of government legislation. However, when placed into the context of wider sociological changes the increasing prevalence of childhood obesity seen from the mid-1980s appears to be strongly associated with changes in government welfare provision, of which the school meal forms a small part. Moreover, this thesis suggests that contemporary associations between low socio-economic status and overweight and obesity prevalence may not have manifested until after 1994. Children who received a free school meal between 1972 and 1994 had, on average, a lower body mass index (BMI) Z-score than children who had a paid school meal, had a packed lunch or went home. Additionally, there were strong relationships between low BMI Z-score and parent’s social class. Overweight and obesity in children rose sharply from the mid-1980s onwards during a period of legislative changes which, according to school cooks, significantly affected the quality of school meals. However, it was not possible to directly attribute these rises to the changes in school meal legislation. Although the school meal has been used as a tool for governing child malnourishment it is not possible to untangle rises in obesity and overweight from wider sociological phenomena which may have also influenced these increases. This thesis suggests that while legislation for school meals may be protective against under-nourishment in children it is currently unclear to what extent this affects childhood obesity

Programme of the 21st European Conference on Eye Movements

About ECEM ECEM was initiated by Rudolf Groner (Bern), Dieter Heller (Bayreuth at the time) and Henk Breimer (Tilburg) in the 198 to provide a forum for an interdisciplinary group of scientists interested in eye movements. Since the inaugural meeting in Bern, the conference has been held every two years in different venues across Europe until 2021, when it was planned to take place in Leicester but was cancelled due to the COVID pandemic. It was decided to hold the meeting in Leicester in August 2022 instead, and as an in person meeting rather than an online or hybrid event. Incidentally, the present meeting is the third time the conference has come to the English East Midlands, now in Leicester following previous meetings in the neighbouring cities of Derby and Nottingham. The sites of previous ECEMs and webpages can be found here

A further look at postview effects in reading: An eye-movements study of influences from the left of fixation

When reading from left to right, useful information acquired during each fixational pause is widely assumed to extend 14 to 15 characters to the right of fixation but just 3 to 4 characters to the left, and certainly no further than the beginning of the fixated word. However, this leftward extent is strikingly small and seems inconsistent with other aspects of reading performance and with the general horizontal symmetry of visual input. Accordingly, 2 experiments were conducted to examine the influence of text located to the left of fixation during each fixational pause using an eye-tracking paradigm in which invisible boundaries were created in sentence displays. Each boundary corresponded to the leftmost edge of each word so that, as each sentence was read, the normal letter content of text to the left of each fixated word was corrupted by letter replacements that were either visually similar or visually dissimilar to the originals. The proximity of corrupted text to the left of fixation was maintained at 1, 2, 3, or 4 words from the left boundary of each fixated word. In both experiments, relative to completely normal text, reading performance was impaired when each type of letter replacement was up to 2 words to the left of fixated words but letter replacements further from fixation produced no impairment. These findings suggest that key aspects of reading are influenced by information acquired during each fixational pause from much further leftward than is usually assumed. Some of the implications of these findings for reading are discussed

Fast and slow readers and the effectiveness of the spatial frequency content of text: Evidence from reading times and eye movements

© 2016 American Psychological Association. Text contains a range of different spatial frequencies but the effectiveness of spatial frequencies for normal variations in skilled adult reading ability is unknown. Accordingly, young skilled adult readers showing fast or slow reading ability read sentences displayed as normal or filtered to contain only very low, low, medium, high, or very high spatial frequencies. Reading times and eye movement measures of fixations and saccades assessed the effectiveness of these displays for reading. Reading times showed that, for each reading ability, medium, high, and very high spatial frequencies were all more effective than lower spatial frequencies. Indeed, for each reading ability, reading times for normal text were maintained when text contained only medium, high, or very high spatial frequencies. However, reading times for normal text and for each spatial frequency were all substantially shorter for fast readers than for slow readers, and this advantage for fast readers was similar for normal, medium, high, and very high spatial frequencies but much larger for low and very low spatial frequencies. In addition, fast readers made fewer and shorter fixations, fewer and shorter regressions, and longer forward saccades, than slow readers, and these differences were generally similar in size for normal, medium, high, and very high spatial frequencies, but larger when spatial frequencies were lower. These findings suggest that fast and slow adult readers can each use a range of different spatial frequencies for reading but fast readers make more effective use of these spatial frequencies and especially those that are lower

Effects of spatial frequencies on word identification by fast and slow readers: Evidence from eye movements

� 2016 Jordan, Dixon, McGowan, Kurtev and Paterson. Recent research has shown that differences in the effectiveness of spatial frequencies for fast and slow skilled adult readers may be an important component of differences in reading ability in the skilled adult reading population (Jordan et al., 2016a). But the precise nature of this influence on lexical processing during reading remains to be fully determined. Accordingly, to gain more insight into the use of spatial frequencies by skilled adult readers with fast and slow reading abilities, the present study looked at effects of spatial frequencies on the processing of specific target words in sentences. These target words were of either high or low lexical frequency and each sentence was displayed as normal or filtered to contain only very low, low, medium, high, or very high spatial frequencies. Eye movement behavior for target words was closest to normal for each reading ability when text was shown in medium or higher spatial frequency displays, although reading occurred for all spatial frequencies. Moreover, typical word frequency effects (the processing advantage for words with higher lexical frequencies) were observed for each reading ability across a broad range of spatial frequencies, indicating that many different spatial frequencies provide access to lexical representations during textual reading for both fast and slow skilled adult readers. Crucially, however, target word fixations were fewer and shorter for fast readers than for slow readers for all display types, and this advantage for fast readers appeared to be similar for normal, medium, high, and very high spatial frequencies but larger for low and very low spatial frequencies. Therefore, although fast and slow skilled adult readers can both use a broad range of spatial frequencies when reading, fast readers make more effective use of these spatial frequencies, and especially those that are lower, when processing the identities of words

A rapid review examining purchasing changes resulting from fiscal measures targeted at high sugar food and non-alcoholic drinks

To aim of the review was to examine the most recent (2010 onwards) research evidence on the health and behavioural impacts, in adults and children, of fiscal strategies that target high sugar foods and sugar-sweetened drinks (SSDs). A pragmatic rapid review was undertaken using a systematic search strategy. The review was part of a programme of work to support policy development in relation to high sugar food and SSDs. A total of 11 primary research publications were included, describing evidence from France (n = 1), the Netherlands (n = 3), and the United States of America (n = 7), assessed through a variety of study designs, with the majority in adult populations (n = 10). The evidence reviewed focused on consumer behaviour outcomes and suggested that fiscal strategies can influence purchases of high sugar products. Although the majority of studies (n = 10), including three field studies, demonstrated that an increase in the price of high sugar foods and SSDs resulted in a decrease in purchases, eight studies were conducted in a laboratory or virtual setting which may not reflect real-life situations. Findings from this review support evidence from the broader literature that suggests that fiscal measures can be effective in influencing the purchasing of high sugar foods and SSDs

Adult Age Differences in Eye Movements During Reading: The Evidence From Chinese

Abstract Objectives: Substantial evidence indicates that older readers of alphabetic languages (e.g., English and German) compensate for age-related reading difficulty by employing a more risky reading strategy in which words are skipped more frequently. The effects of healthy aging on reading behavior for nonalphabetic languages, like Chinese, are largely unknown, although this would reveal the extent to which age-related changes in reading strategy are universal. Accordingly, the present research used measures of eye movements to investigate adult age differences in Chinese reading. Method: The eye movements of young (18-30 years) and older (60+ years) Chinese readers were recorded. Results: The older adults exhibited typical patterns of age-related reading difficulty. But rather than employing a more risky reading strategy compared with the younger readers, the older adults read more carefully by skipping words infrequently, making shorter forward eye movements, and fixating closer to the beginnings of two-character target words in sentences. Discussion: In contrast with the findings for alphabetic languages, older Chinese readers appear to compensate for agerelated reading difficulty by employing a more careful reading strategy. Age-related changes in reading strategy therefore appear to be language specific, rather than universal, and may reflect the specific visual and linguistic requirements of the writing system