According to the Department for Transport, a large proportion of road traffic collisions occur each year due to human error, with a substantial amount occurring as the driver failed to look properly. There is a need to raise awareness of the importance of paying attention on the road.

The research team at the University of Warwick have been working with driver education programmes, police training forces and local authorities to educate road users about the importance of paying attention and to minimize distraction while driving.

This talk will show evidence debunking some of the ‘myths’ people hold around mobile phone use while driving and give an overview of a short and effective ‘Change Blindness’ intervention used to help people become aware of their need to pay attention on the road.

Dr Melina Kunar, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology, University of Warwick

Dr Melina Kunar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick. Dr Kunar completed her PhD at the University of Birmingham before being awarded a Fellowship to work at the University of Bangor.

She then went to Harvard Medical School, USA, to complete a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship where she investigated the mechanisms people use to pay attention to the visual world. Dr Kunar is an expert in attention and her current research examines human interaction with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and technology in applied tasks such as driving and healthcare.

Since 2008, Dr Kunar has been researching how distraction, such as mobile phone use, interferes with attention and driving. She has worked with driver education programmes, police training forces and Local Authorities to educate road users about the importance of paying attention to the road and to minimise distraction.

Her research team at the University of Warwick have created a road safety intervention, which is being used by Local Authorities and road safety campaigns around the UK to educate road users about the limits of attention and the importance of observational abilities when driving. Dr Kunar holds a prestigious Turing Fellowship at the Alan Turing Institute, the UK's National Institute for Data Science and AI.