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Infants go through two main stages in learning to accept foods.

Acceptance in the first year of life:

Infants learn to like the foods that they are given and that they see others around them eating.
They get used to the taste of the food, the texture of the food, and then identify the food by the way that it looks.

Rejection in the second year of life:

The food is rejected on sight.
There is a visual mismatch between the foods that they have learned to like, and the new food.

From an evolutionary point of view rejecting food on sight is a sensible reaction. It would not be a good idea for a toddler to put a possibly poisonous substance in the mouth to test whether or not it was edible. see Factsheet 2.3