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
Ehly: Your brain is literally rotting. Stop it before it’s too late
The Daily Emerald online
2025-06-16
Brain rot inherently discourages critical thought and lessens the ability to concentrate. The more short-form, vapid videos a person consumes, the shorter their attention span becomes. Chancellor’s Professor and Psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, Dr. Gloria Mark said in an interview with the American Psychological Association that in 2004, the average attention span was measured at an average of two minutes and 30 seconds. In 2012, the average decreased to 75 seconds, and in the last five or six years, the average has decreased to about 47 seconds.
I hope I haven’t just seen the future of hospitality
The Boston Globe online
2025-06-03
Gloria Mark, UC Irvine Chancellor’s Professor emerita of informatics writes, “We need to carefully consider what technology should and should not replace. A future hospitality industry without a human touch — in hotels, restaurants, stores, taxis — will only deepen a culture of disconnection. AI can learn your preferences, but it can’t offer empathy. We will likely quickly normalize fully automated experiences, and it will feel as ordinary as self-check-in kiosks do today. Yes, it will be more efficient, and yes, it will reduce costs. But something intangible will be lost: a piece of our shared humanity.
How We All Lost Our Focus—And How to Get It Back
Vogue online
2025-06-02
Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of the 2023 book Attention Span, reminds me that one doesn’t need to turn the pursuit of calm into its own commodity. … the solution she advocates is pointedly simple: Go for a walk; take breaks; accept that you’re a morning person or an evening person, and orient your day around those hours. “You just can’t keep running on empty. You need to set aside time,” Mark says. “And setting aside time does not mean spending an hour doing your email. Attention is goal-directed,” she adds. “We need to pay attention to what our goals are.”
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.
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.
