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, how to improve human interaction with technology/Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how distraction interferes with road safety and 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 human mechanisms of cognition and attention. Dr Kunar is an expert in attention and her current research examines human-AI interactions and how people attend to AI prompts in tasks such as medical screening for cancers. Her research also investigates optimal ways for humans to interact with AI and technology to maximize the benefits, while minimising the costs (such as over-reliance effects and bias). Other research interests include the impact of distraction and technology on attention. 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. Dr Kunar is a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, the UK's National Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.