Many tasks involve attention making it an important focus of research (e.g. driving, medical screening). My research investigates how people pay attention to their environment and how they use this information to inform preferences and decision making. The findings have many applications for health, economic and socially important tasks, such as how to improve search for cancers in medical images, baggage screening for threats at airports, human interaction with technology/Artificial Intelligence, road safety and how distraction interferes with driving (for example, by talking on mobile phones).

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 visual attention and her current research examines how people perform different applied visual tasks such as searching medical images for cancers and baggage screeners searching for potential threats at airports. She has also been researching how distraction, such as talking on mobile phones, interferes with attention and driving. She has worked with driver education programs, police training forces and Local Authorities to educate road users about the importance of paying attention to the road and to minimise distraction while driving.