Gloria Mark
Chancellor's Professor Informatics UC Irvine
- Irvine CA
Gloria Mark's research area is human-computer interaction (HCI) studying how technology has impacted individuals, groups, and society.
Media
Social
Biography
Areas of Expertise
Accomplishments
ACM CHI Academy
2017
Google Research Award
2014
IBM Faculty Award
2013
Education
Columbia University
PhD
Psychology
1991
The University of Michigan
MS
Biostatistics
1984
Affiliations
- Assoc. for Computing Machinery (ACM) : Member
- ACM SIGCHI
- Fulbright Association
Media Appearances
Easily distracted? How to improve your attention span
Associated Press online
2025-05-17
Feel like you can’t focus? … You’re far from alone. One body of decades-long research (led by Gloria Mark, UC Irvine professor emeritus of informatics) found the average person’s attention span for a single screen is 47 seconds, down from 2.5 minutes in 2004. The 24/7 news cycle, uncertainty about the state of the world and countless hours of screen time don’t help, experts say.
Too much mindless scrolling can shrink your attention span: ‘The problem is we can’t pull ourselves out,’ psychologist says
CNBC Make It online
2025-04-14
Are we consuming too much content? Yes, and it’s overwhelming us, says psychologist Gloria Mark. “When we’re overwhelmed with processing so much information, our cognitive resources drain. When they drain, our mind gets fatigued,” she tells CNBC Make It. Mark is also a Chancellor’s professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine. … “When you get into this habit of consuming short-form and shallow content, it’s really hard to pull out and take a deep dive into consuming books or long-form articles.” Mark says. … Mark offers up some tips for how to spend more time engaging with longer form content: ….
The Daily Habit That Kills Productivity—And How to Fix It
Best Life online
2025-04-09
Gloria Mark, PhD, a professor at the University of California Irvine, highlighted on a recent American Psychological Association podcast that our attention span has plummeted. In the early 2000s, we could stay focused on a screen for an average of two and a half minutes. In the last five years, it's fallen to just 47 seconds - and it's only continuing to decline. … One study found that the impact of interrupted work can be devastating in terms of added stress.
Question About What's Quietly Disappeared in the Last Decade Sparks Debate
Newsweek online
2025-03-14
Research has shown that the digital age, with its emphasis on brief and rapidly changing content, has contributed to reduced attention spans, making it more challenging for individuals to engage with longer texts. In 2023, Dr. Gloria Mark, a psychologist and professor at UC Irvine, spoke on an American Psychological Association podcast. Highlighting her concerns about young children's screen time, she emphasized its potential long-term effects on attention and focus.
Understanding attention and a craving for certainty
ABC Radio National online
2025-03-07
Gloria Mark, UC Irvine professor of informatics warned us that the average attention span is shrinking. “We have been tracking attention spans over the last 20 years. … In the last five years we found the average time [spent on any particular screen before switching] is 47 seconds.” … “People have limited attentional capacity, there are things that we can do to boost capacity ….”
Why You Feel Like An Imposter, Burnt Out, And Distracted At Work — And What To Do About It
Allwork.Space online
2025-02-26
Even if you manage to keep imposter syndrome in check and avoid burnout, there’s one more obstacle in the way of success: attention fatigue. “I started measuring attention spans on screens 20 years ago, and we found them to average about two and a half minutes,” says Gloria Mark, Chancellor’s Professor Emerita at the University of California, [Irvine] a leading researcher on attention spans and digital habits. “And that shocked me at the time because I thought, wow, that’s pretty short. But it really surprised me that after 20 years, people average 47 seconds.”
We must wage war on screens
Business & Financial Times Online online
2025-02-11
Researchers installed tracking software on their computers to monitor their daily activities. The findings revealed that students, on average, changed tasks approximately every 65 seconds. Their median attention span on any single activity lasted only 19 seconds. Another study conducted by Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, found that the average office worker remains focused on a single task for only three minutes. The near-ceaseless cacophony of beeps, notifications, and popups has created a commensurate escalation in screentime.
Articles
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.
