Local authorities and Road Safety Partnerships across the UK routinely deliver road-safety interventions, yet traditional evaluation methods often fail to capture changes in public knowledge, attitudes, and behavioural intentions—key drivers of long-term behaviour change. 

To address this gap, the research team at the University of Warwick developed the Change Blindness (CB) Road Safety Intervention, designed to raise awareness of attentional lapses among drivers and pedestrians. Although widely adopted across schools, community settings, and driver-training programmes, the intervention previously lacked a standardised evaluation framework.

This project co-designed and tested a unified evaluation toolkit in collaboration with the Warwickshire Road Safety Partnership. The toolkit assessed changes in knowledge, attitudes, behavioural intentions, and susceptibility to peer influence across three core road-safety themes: speeding, distracted driving, and pedestrian distraction. 

Evaluations were conducted with younger adults (18–24 years) and older adults (60+ years), two groups known to experience distinct road-safety challenges. Across all evaluations, the CB intervention produced demonstrable improvements in participants’ road-safety knowledge, attitudes, and behavioural intentions. Younger and older adults showed positive but distinct shifts across the behavioural domains, highlighting the intervention’s broad applicability and its capacity to address age-specific road-safety challenges. The resulting evaluation toolkit offers a scalable, evidence-based method that road-safety teams can integrate into their local programmes to support meaningful changes in road-safety attitudes and intentions.

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.