Dakota Reis, B.A.

Project Coordinator

The Cognition, Affect, and Temperament Lab

Pennsylvania State University

Personal Interests

Outside of research, I'm also an avid rock-climber with over 7-years of climbing experience and 3 years of coaching experience. I started my climbing career at a small gym located in New Jersey, Garden State Rocks, and I immediately fell in love with the sport. Soon after, I got a job at that very same gym teaching youth classes and the rest was history. By the end of my career, I managed to coach our small youth team to the USAC Youth Nationals 2-years in a row, beating some of the largest teams in the U.S.Throughout my time spent in the climbing industry, no other job has provided me with greater satisfaction. I find it deeply rewarding to see the kids I've worked with grow into young adults that continue to challenge themselves, train hard, and maintain a healthy relationship with the sport.While I no longer coach full-time, my love for the sport still remains and I would love to direct future research towards developing training efficiencies for climbing athletes.

To learn more about my climbing journey, please click here

Research Projects

Our Main Questions

1) How do patterns of dyadic social dynamics vary across parent-child pairs?

2) To what extent does variation in dyadic patterns help predict anxiety risk?

3) Over time, can we predict socioemotional profiles and anxiety risk from earlier patterns of dynamic dyadic interactions?

Study Description

Participation in this study requires three steps; (1) a remote interview with the primary parent, (2) an in-lab visit scheduled with the primary parent and child, and (3) an additional set of questionnaires given to the secondary parent. The in-lab session takes about 2-3 hours to complete. During which, parents and their children (ages 4-7) are asked to play several games while we collect behavioral, fNIRS, and Mobile Eye-tracking data.

Tasks & Measures

*About Child, **About Primary Parent, ***About Secondary Parent, ****About Family

Tasks & Measures

*About Child, **About Primary Parent, ***About Secondary Parent, ****About Family

Since the COVID-19 pandemic put a number of constraints on our ability to collect data with children in the lab, new approaches to study child development were necessary. Here, we used a videoconference platform (Zoom) to study spatial play at home, along with the spatial and constructive toys that parents typically choose for their children. The existing studies that have examined children and their parents playing with toys in the home have focused on the relationship between the frequency of spatial play and parent support, or parent language and children’s performance on spatial tasks. This study sought to characterize the variability in various factors linked to spatial skills in children during their naturalistic play with spatial toys they had at home.We explored variability in the types of puzzles families of 3 and 4-year-old children (N=30) interact with in their homes, and the nature of those parent-child interactions during naturalistic play. The study was conducted over Zoom, and we simply recorded parents and their children as they played.

Our Main Question

How does variability in spatial toys found at home influence parental behavior and language during puzzle play?

Parent Behaviors

Parent scaffolding events were identified throughout the play session. Scaffolding events consisted of the sum of four different behaviors: (1) removing a piece that was placed in an incorrect space by the child, (2) helping by handing the child individual pieces or rotating pieces for the child, (3) pointing or outlining to a piece or a space in the puzzle, (4) pointing or outlining to the pictorial representation of the puzzle. We created a total scaffolding score by summing the instances of each of these behaviors. In addition to scaffolding, we also coded instances where parents inserted a piece into the puzzle for the child. This final code was not included in the total scaffolding behavior score.

Parental Language

Spatial language included any mention of spatial dimensions, shapes, locations and directions, orientations and transformations, spatial features, and properties. Examples of utterances coded as containing spatial language are “where’s the flat edge?”, “but I think you might need to rotate it a little,” and “this is a big puzzle." We only included spatial terms that were in reference to the construction of the puzzles and omitted terms that were unrelated to the puzzle.In addition to spatial language, we also coded praise and persistence-focused language, which have been linked to more general engagement and persistence in children. Praise included utterances that positively evaluated the child or the child’s actions (e.g., “You’re good at puzzles”; “good job”), or utterances that expressed general positive valence toward the child but not directed at any specific action (e.g., “Awesome!”; “Yay!”). Persistence-focused language consisted of utterances that were focused on trying or repeated attempts to complete a goal-directed action. Frequently, this consisted of phrases that explicitly referred to acts of trying (e.g., “You’re trying so hard!”).

Child Behaviors

Children's insertion attempts were identified throughout the play session. An insertion attempt was defined as the first time the child took one puzzle piece and proceeded to either join it with one or more additional pieces or place it in an opening in a puzzle tray. An insertion attempt could be either successful if the child placed the piece in the correct space or unsuccessful if the child failed to insert the piece correctly and proceeded to place the piece back down on the floor or table. Each time the child attempted to insert the same piece in any opening or location was counted as a single event, which ended when the child either successfully inserted the piece or placed it down.After coding initial insertion attempts, a trained coder went back to each insertion attempt and counted the number of times the children unsuccessfully attempted to insert a single piece before either successfully inserting it or putting it down. An unsuccessful attempt was coded every time the child tried to insert the piece into a different place in the puzzle or in the same place but in a different orientation. A different orientation was defined as a rotation of the piece more than 90 degrees.

Conclusions

The most noteworthy finding from this descriptive study is the enormous variability we observed in both children and parents’ behaviors, and in the puzzles they selected for play. This study is the first of its kind in provide detailed characterization of the kinds of puzzles children have at their homes as well as the variability in parents’ and children’s behavior while engaging in home puzzle play. However, despite the large amount of variability reported here, there are some relationships documented in previous literature that were also evident in the current sample, speaking to their robustness.For example, similar to our results, several studies have shown that parents provide more assistance to younger versus older children during puzzle-building tasks, suggesting that parents might adjust their behavior to fit different children’s needs. Finally, we found several gender differences suggesting that girls were more persistent than boys, making more attempts to place pieces into the puzzle after failure, and that parents used more persistence-focused language with girls than with boys and gave girls more difficult puzzles. Gender differences in children’s spatial ability and spatial play have also been reported in previous literature, usually attributing more advanced spatial skills to boys than girls, but these findings are controversial and require further research.

Curriculum Vitae

For the full PDF version, please click hereLast Updated: October 2022

Education

Professional Experience

Publications and Posters

2022

Anderson, A.J., Furtado, E., Schneider, C., Iroh, U., Thiem, S., Reis, D., Edgar-Perez, K., Perlman, S.B. (2022, November). Now and then: The role of neural and cognitive efficiency during behavioral control and in socially inhibited children. Short talk presented at the 2022 meeting of the International Society for Developmental Psychobiology, San Diego, CA.

2021

Leotti, L., Pochinki, N., Reis, D., Bonawitz, E., & LoBue, V. (2021). Learning about germs in a global pandemic: Children’s knowledge and avoidance of contagious illness before and after COVID-19. Cognitive Development, 59, 101090. Publisher's Version.

Pochinki, N., Agbamu, S., Reis, D., Avalos, R., Starling, S., B Velarde, Yassein, F., Oakes, L., Casola, M., LoBue, V. 2021. Can Parental Scaffolding During Spatial Play Predict Children’s Spatial Skills? Poster presented at the Biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Virtual (due to COVID-19).

Pochinki N, Reis D, Casasola M, Oakes LM, LoBue V. Natural Variability in Parent-Child Puzzle Play at Home. Front Psychol. 2021 Sep 16;12:733895. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.733895. PMID: 34603155; PMCID: PMC8483633.

Reis, D., Leotti, L., Pochinki, N., Bonawitz, E., & LoBue, V. (2021, April). Learning about Germs in a Global Pandemic: Children’s Knowledge and Behavior Before and After COVID-19. Poster presented at the Biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Virtual (due to COVID-19).

Awards and Honors

Teaching

Last Updated: October 2022

Climbing

My Origin Story

Not yet written

Photo by Mark Melendez

Tick List

New York

Ice Pond

Badger (V5)
Cowabunga (V8)
Donatello Right (V5)
Flip Phone (V8)
Intergalactic (V8)
Mongoose (V6)
Raphael Left (V7)
Raphael Right (V4)
Spatula O’Keefe (V9)
Stool Sample (V6)
The Churro (V8)
The Burro (V7)

Pennsylvania