Kat Coto. Photo courtesy of Coto

Dance minor Kat Coto ’27 combines science and dance interests in research at USC lab.

By Jana F. Brown

Tapping her index finger and thumb together to simulate a biting motion, Kat Coto ’27 demonstrates the interactive movements made by small children in the research lab where she works in USC’s Division of Biokinesiology and Physical Therapy. They also clap their hands together and move them in wave-like motions to mimic baby fins. The kids, along with their parents, are responding to a viral, children’s song with a catchy chorus.

“‘Baby Shark,’ will always get the parents or child going,” says Coto, an undergraduate research assistant in the Learning Development Rehabilitation Lab (LDR). “The children do the fin thing [with their hands]. You can tell a difference when ‘Baby Shark’ is on.”

As a human biology major also minoring in dance at USC Kaufman, Coto is combining her skills and interests for the research project in the LDR. Her primary role on the research team for “Characterizing Spontaneous Infant Locomotion” involves behavioral coding of video-recorded play sessions between young children and their parents. In those 20-minute sessions, music is played for half the time and absent for the remainder so researchers can look for differences in motor behaviors with and without the sound. The study includes both typically developing children and children with Down syndrome at the same stage of motor development. Volunteer families are recruited through flyers and word of mouth. The project is partially funded by a small pilot grant from the USC Center of Music, Brain, and Society.

The research focuses on the psychological effects of music and movement and how these experiences may benefit children in the future. Coto’s job is to analyze when babies are dancing, when they’re not, and what types of dance movements they perform, also documenting parental behavior to see whether and how parents’ dancing influences their children. Anecdotally, Coto appreciates the joy in the children with Down syndrome, noting how they “light up” when the music plays.

“Our primary interest is how infants with and without Down’s use locomotor movements (crawling and walking) to play and explore,” explains Assistant Professor, Kari Kretch, PT, DPT, PhD, the director and principal investigator in the lab. “However, the free-play observation procedure is broad enough to support investigation into other aspects of parent-child play and interaction.”

As a California native and first-generation college student with a childhood deeply rooted in dance, Coto’s decision to transfer to USC in her junior year from Pasadena City College has allowed her to focus on applied physiology, biomechanics, and motor learning, while also participating in Kaufman’s offerings. In her first year at USC, Coto found a community in the Kaufman building, where she took multiple dance classes and participated in performance opportunities through the Dance Club. In her free time, she also works as a children’s dance teacher and choreographer at Sapphire Dance Studio in nearby Temple City.

“Having that dance minor is really nice,” says Coto, who’s also in the process of starting a First Generations in Healthcare club at USC, “because I get to go to that side of campus, not just the science side.”

Through her studies, Coto is learning how strength impacts flexibility, the importance of weight training for health, and why dancers are often injury-prone without proper training. This knowledge directly informs her work teaching dance and conducting research with children.

So far in the LDR study, explains Flor Enriques, the lead Ph.D. student on the project,

data have shown that, in the Down syndrome group, the amount of dancing shown by infants is correlated with the amount of dancing shown by their parents.

“Infants who dance more tend to have parents who also dance more, whereas infants who dance less tend to have parents who also dance less,” Enriques says. “This relationship was statistically significant. Interestingly, this pattern differed in the other group, where infant and parent dance behaviors appeared to be more independent. We found a similar pattern for dance types: infants and parents in the DS group tended to show similar types of dance behaviors, whereas infants and parents in the [typical] group again showed more independence in the types of dances they displayed. Lastly, we found that dancing behavior was highly variable and was not related to age, walking skill, or music familiarity.”

While Coto loves the work she’s doing at USC and will apply it to future endeavors, she plans to become a pediatric dentist or pediatric oral surgeon. Looking ahead, Coto hopes to keep dance in her life, taking advantage of dentistry’s relatively predictable hours to continue teaching children and integrating her science and dance backgrounds in her work with kids. Incidentally, she discovered dentistry as a hands-on, skills-based profession that aligns with her personal learning style, something that also aligns with the behavior patterns of the children and parents she’s observing in the LDR.

“Dentistry is a lot of learning by doing,” Coto explains. “Something I developed growing up as a dancer is that it’s the best way for me to learn.”