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Biography
Gloria Mark is Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD from Columbia University in psychology. She has been a visiting senior researcher at Microsoft Research since 2012. Her primary research interest is in understanding the impact of digital media on people's lives and she is best known for her work in studying people's multitasking, mood and behavior while using digital media in real world environments. She has published over 150 papers in the top journals and conferences in the fields of human-computer interactions (HCI) and Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) and is author of the book Multitasking in the Digital Age. She was inducted into the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2017 in recognition for her contribution in HCI. She has been a Fulbright scholar and has received an NSF Career grant. Her work has been recognized outside of academia: she has been invited to present her work at SXSW and the Aspen Ideas Festival and her work on multitasking has appeared in the popular media, e.g. New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Atlantic, the BBC, and many others. She was general co-chair of the ACM CHI 2017 conference, was papers chair of ACM CSCW 2012 and ACM CSCW 2006, and currently serves as Associate Editor of the ACM TOCHI and Human-Computer Interaction journals.
Areas of Expertise (4)
Information Technology
Email Interruptions
Human-Computer Interaction
Multi-Tasking
Accomplishments (3)
ACM CHI Academy (professional)
2017
Google Research Award (professional)
2014
IBM Faculty Award (professional)
2013
Education (2)
Columbia University: PhD, Psychology 1991
The University of Michigan: MS, Biostatistics 1984
Affiliations (3)
- Assoc. for Computing Machinery (ACM) : Member
- ACM SIGCHI
- Fulbright Association
Links (3)
Media Appearances (14)
5 Essential Tips For How Leaders Can Skyrocket Productivity
Forbes online
2024-06-06
A Harvard study suggests the popular open-office layout could hinder productivity. These environments can prevent focus and don't necessarily enhance teamwork as once thought. ... University of California, Irvine, Professor Gloria Mark revealed it takes an average of 23 minutes to refocus after an interruption. Creating a personal space that limits distractions can significantly increase your productivity.
Your attention span is shrinking, studies say. Here’s how to stay focused
CNN online
2024-05-15
Unfortunately, all too many of us are having “squirrel” days, according to Dr. Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, who studies how digital media affects our lives. In her book “Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity,” Mark explains how decades of research have tracked the decline of the ability to focus.
How I Got My Attention Span Back
The Wall Street Journal online
2024-05-03
Research shows our attention spans have been shrinking over time. In 2004, we could stay focused on a screen for 150 seconds on average. In 2012, we were down to 75 seconds. Between 2016 and 2020, it had fallen to an average of 47 seconds. That’s according to Gloria Mark, a professor emerita at University of California, Irvine, and author of the book “Attention Span.” … Mark, the UC Irvine professor, says my experiment was like a crash diet: effective but fleeting. I needed some kind of longer-term plan to help keep me at peak attention span.
How to improve focus: Try these 5 tips to increase attention span
USA Today online
2024-05-02
Gloria Mark, a chancellor’s professor emerita at the University of California, Irvine and the author of “Attention Span,” first began studying attention spans in 2003. … There are two types of attention – rote and active. Active attention is an engaging and challenging state of focus, Mark says, like when reading a difficult book or writing a paper. When you’re engaged but not challenged (like watching a video or playing Candy Crush) you’re using rote attention. In her research, Mark found that people are happiest when using rote attention but experience a deeper fulfillment when they use active attention. Use these five tips to balance the two.
Distracted Students? Understanding These 3 Myths of Attention Span Can Help
KQED online
2024-04-23
Digital technologies have been innovated quicker than humans are capable of processing, and our new tools and social media are designed to keep us tapping and swiping. This has become an issue that impedes attention span because “the mind has a limited pool of cognitive resources,” said Mark, who is a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine. … In her research, Mark has identified three myths of attention span and tech use. Understanding these myths can help teachers and parents guide young people in maintaining – and regaining – focus throughout the school day.
Americans check their phones 144 times a day: How you can break bad digital habits
CNBC online
2024-04-17
Frequently switching between tasks can have consequences on your health, according to Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, who wrote a book about attention span and how to refocus when distracted. Shifting what you’re focusing on often can increase levels of stress, require more mental effort to complete tasks and cause feelings of frustration and time pressure, Mark told Fast Company in 2008.
A Multitasker’s Guide to Regaining Focus
The New York Times online
2024-03-11
“Usually, when people think they’re multitasking, they’re actually switching their attention back and forth between two separate tasks,” said Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and author of “Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity.”
Executive functioning coaching isn’t just for kids. How experts are helping workers adjust to a hectic working world
Fast Company online
2024-03-07
In her book Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Happiness, Balance, and Productivity, Gloria Mark states that, overall, our attention span is decreasing, as we log more time on screens and are required more regularly to switch between opposing tasks and their related mental modes. Mark’s research at the University of California, Irvine shows that an average attention span of 75 seconds in 2012, dropped in 2016 to an average of 47 seconds.
Man, Interrupted — The High Cost of Distractions
Medium online
2024-02-26
The cost of losing focus is about 25 minutes per interruption. … And I didn’t make this stuff up. Multiple academics have studied how long it takes to return to your original task after an interruption. It turns out Gloria Mark from the University of California, Irvine is the Original G on this topic. She says these distractions not only ruin your focus and mental progress, but they also have negative emotional effects. They often lead to higher stress and bad moods. Sure, Gloria notes half of our daily interruptions are self-inflicted; and it’s just more time wasted — it’s keeping us from our best thinking.
In defense of busywork
The Verge online
2024-02-15
I reached out to Gloria Mark …to ask her how workers might fare in a post-busywork society. I was particularly interested to hear from Mark because she was a co-author of a 2014 study by researchers from UC Irvine and Microsoft which found that people are happiest when doing rote work and most stressed when doing focused work. Mark told me my questions about an AI future raise a specific concern for her. “If people are going to be saddled with all this complex work because we’re being relieved of doing lighter work, then this can lead to burnout,” she said. … “I think busywork, even though it may not make us happy, is a way to relieve this cognitive load, because we’re doing things that don’t require a lot of thought.”
Actually, compartmentalizing can be good for you
Los Angeles Times online
2024-02-14
As questions about our political, environmental and technological future loom, experts say that compartmentalizing can be a useful tool to help us regulate our emotions and face challenges without falling apart. Yes, it’s a defense mechanism that sometimes gets a bad rap, said Gloria Mark … professor [emeritus] of informatics at UC Irvine — but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad for you. “It’s a function that helps us navigate through our days without being burdened by all the stress,” she said.
Addicted to distraction: How our world is robbing our ability to pay attention
KCRW – Life Examined online
2024-02-11
This fundamental shift in how we live, think, and work has been the focus of over 20 years of research for Gloria Mark. She’s a psychologist and professor of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California. Irvine. In 2004, when Mark started her research, the average attention span was two and a half minutes. By 2020 that number had decreased to 47 seconds - and technology has played a significant role in that rapid decline. …
The Hidden Cost of Distractions, and How to Short-Circuit Them
Entrepreneur online
2024-02-08
Gloria Mark, of the University of California, Irvine, detailed in a 2006 Gallup article that the average amount of time people spent on any single event before being interrupted or before switching was about three minutes. More shocking still was the revelation that it required an average of 23 minutes to return to the original task. (It's worth noting, too, that this research is more than 15 years old, and that digital tools and their inherent distractions have since become even more ingrained in our lives.)
How to be alone with your thoughts
Vox online
2024-01-20
Gloria Mark, a professor emerita in the department of informatics at the University of California, Irvine and author of Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity, reflects on three positive things from the day before bed each night. When the topics of thought are more personally meaningful and positive, people find the practice more enjoyable, studies show.
Articles (5)
Characterizing Exploratory Behaviors on a Personal Visualization Interface Using Interaction Logs
OSF PreprintsPoorna TalkadSukumar, Gonzalo J Martinez, Ted Grover, Gloria Mark, Sidney D'Mello, Nitesh V Chawla, Stephen M Mattingly, Aaron D Striegel
2020 Personal visualizations present a separate class of visualizations where users interact with their own data to draw inferences about themselves. In this paper, we study how a realistic understanding of personal visualizations can be gained from analyzing user interactions. We designed an interface presenting visualizations of the personal data gathered in a prior study and logged interactions from 369 participants as they each explored their own data.
A Multisensor Person-Centered Approach to Understand the Role of Daily Activities in Job Performance with Organizational Personas
Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous TechnologiesVedant Das Swain, Koustuv Saha, Hemang Rajvanshy, Anusha Sirigiri, Julie M Gregg, Suwen Lin, Gonzalo J Martinez, Stephen M Mattingly, Shayan Mirjafari, Raghu Mulukutla, Subigya Nepal, Kari Nies, Manikanta D Reddy, Pablo Robles-Granda, Andrew T Campbell, Nitesh V Chawla, Sidney D'Mello, Anind K Dey, Kaifeng Jiang, Qiang Liu, Gloria Mark, Edward Moskal, Aaron Striegel, Louis Tay, Gregory D Abowd, Munmun De Choudhury
2019 Several psychologists posit that performance is not only a function of personality but also of situational contexts, such as day-level activities. Yet in practice, since only personality assessments are used to infer job performance, they provide a limited perspective by ignoring activity. However, multi-modal sensing has the potential to characterize these daily activities. This paper illustrates how empirically measured activity data complements traditional effects of personality to explain a worker's performance.
Stress and productivity patterns of interrupted, synergistic, and antagonistic office activities
Scientific DataShaila Zaman, Amanveer Wesley, Dennis Rodrigo Da Cunha Silva, Pradeep Buddharaju, Fatema Akbar, Ge Gao, Gloria Mark, Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna & Ioannis Pavlidis
2019 We describe a controlled experiment, aiming to study productivity and stress effects of email interruptions and activity interactions in the modern office. The measurement set includes multimodal data for n = 63 knowledge workers who volunteered for this experiment and were randomly assigned into four groups: (G1/G2) Batch email interruptions with/without exogenous stress.
The Perpetual Work Life of Crowdworkers: How Tooling Practices Increase Fragmentation in Crowdwork
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer InteractionAlex C Williams, Gloria Mark, Kristy Milland, Edward Lank, Edith Law
2019 Crowdworkers regularly support their work with scripts, extensions, and software to enhance their productivity. Despite their evident significance, little is understood regarding how these tools affect crowdworkers' quality of life and work. In this study, we report findings from an interview study (N=21) aimed at exploring the tooling practices used by full-time crowdworkers on Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Understanding smartphone usage in college classrooms: A long-term measurement study
Computers & EducationInyeop Kim, Rihun Kim, Heepyung Kim, Duyeon Kim, Kyungsik Han, Paul H Lee, Gloria Mark, Uichin Lee
2019 Smartphone usage is widespread in college classrooms, but there is a lack of measurement studies. We conducted a 14-week measurement study in the wild with 84 first-year college students in Korea. We developed a data collection and processing tool for usage logging, mobility tracking, class evaluation, and class attendance detection. Using this dataset, we quantify students' smartphone usage patterns in the classrooms, ranging from simple use duration and frequency to temporal rhythms and interaction patterns.
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