Dr Kate Anning

Overview

I am a final year PhD student and one of the child testers in the Cardiff University Neurodevelopmental Assessment Unit. I am interested in self-regulation skills, such as ‘Executive Functions’, which include our attention, memory and inhibition. In the NDAU we use different tasks to measure self-regulation, assessing how well children can remember picture and number sequences, whether they can pay attention,

ignore distractions and plan, and whether they can switch between matching colours or

shapes. My research aims to understand better how children who have different needs or

difficulties at school or at home perform on these tasks. I have also developed a training to improve some of these skills, especially the ability to pay attention, which we are testing in primary schools.