Gloria Mark
Chancellor's Professor Informatics | UC Irvine
Irvine, CA, UNITED STATES
Gloria Mark's research area is human-computer interaction (HCI) studying how technology has impacted individuals, groups, and society.
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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 (11)
Opinion: Is doom scrolling really rotting our brains? The evidence is getting harder to ignore
The Guardian online
2024-12-09
Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California and author of Attention Span, has found evidence of how drastically our ability to focus is waning. In 2004, her team of researchers found the average attention span on any screen to be two and a half minutes. In 2012, it was 75 seconds. Six years ago, it was down to 47 seconds. This “is something that I think we should be very concerned about as a society”, she told a podcast in 2023.
How smartphones changed our relationship to art
The Boston Globe online
2024-12-02
Gloria Mark, UC Irvine professor emeritus of informatics writes, “In this networked smartphone world, we risk losing the ability to truly see. Next time you go to an art gallery or museum, or pass by an outdoor work of art, spend some time looking at it. Choose one piece that piques your interest and give it your full attention. Resist the urge to reach for your phone. Don’t just snap a photo or selfie but really look at it. It takes time for an artwork to sink in. You might feel something unexpected—a thrill, a sense of wonder, that cannot be put into words.”
Winning the Battle for Attention
JD Supra online
2024-11-20
Dr. Gloria Mark, the Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, studies how humans interact with and are influenced by technology in real world environments. In her book, Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity, she shares the findings from her decades of research and reports that attention spans on any screen have declined from 2.5 minutes in 2004 to just 47 seconds by 2020 . Tech-enabled multitasking, Mark argues, may be to blame ….
‘Please, stop doing this.’ Why we need to finally ban phones from schools.
Boston Globe online
2024-10-01
Now, on average, we check email 77 times a day, according to research by Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine. … And these “little squirts” pull workers away from projects that involve deep thinking: complicated presentations, research, coding. Over the past decade, mountains of research have underscored the fact that humans feel compelled to check messages … And it erodes our ability to concentrate.
How to improve focus: Try these 5 tips to increase attention span
USA Today online
2024-09-26
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. She found that people spent an average of two and a half minutes on any computer screen before switching. In 2012, she repeated the study and saw that number shrink to 75 seconds. … In her research, Mark found that people are happiest when using rote attention but experience a deeper fulfillment when they use active attention.
Skeptic Check: Cell Phone Bans
Big Picture Science radio
2024-09-23
As middle and high schools across the country implement new cell phone bans, we consider what drove this bold step and what science says about how digital devices affect our attention and focus. … Guests: …Gloria Mark - Psychologist, professor in the Department of Informatics at University of California, Irvine, author of book “Attention Span.”
A new wave of scents are here to help with focus, productivity and concentration
Women's Health online
2024-09-19
Some studies have found that notes of rosemary, peppermint and spearmint can help have a positive impact on learning, memory, and even performance on cognitive tasks. This is great news, given than Gloria Mark, PhD, author of Attention Span and a professor at the University of California at Irvine who studies digital behaviour and distraction, has found in her research that the average person’s ability to concentrate on a single onscreen task has shrunk by more than a minute.
The Out-of-Office Reply That Says ‘Stay Out of My Inbox’
The Wall Street Journal online
2024-08-27
The number of emails sent and received worldwide each day has increased 34% since 2017, research shows. … Worse, the costs and benefits of email are unbalanced for senders and receivers, says Gloria Mark, professor emeritus in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, who studies how people interact with tech in their everyday lives. “The sender gets the benefit of the email, because they are asking for something,” Mark says. “The receiver, very often, has to do the work.”
6 simple science-backed ways to boost your attention span
BBC Science Focus online
2024-08-17
According to psychologist Dr Gloria Mark, from the University of California, Irvine, … our average attention span [is about 47 seconds], based on her latest study of people’s use of screens in the workplace. … Unknowingly, you’re probably sabotaging yourself with “self-interruptions” all day long, according to Mark. … Here are some science-backed techniques that can help boost our attention spans … The best way to stretch your length of focus is, according to Mark, to make sure that you start your day after a night of good, high-quality sleep.
Conserving your superpower, which is your attention span
CNN online
2024-08-11
Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine …. noted the growing sophistication of algorithms that trace individual behaviors and interests to curate feeds and ads that follow everyone across platforms. “Tech companies and ad marketing companies use this information to construct profiles about us, and then they design algorithms that are targeted to capture our attention,” Mark said. … Here are Mark’s suggestions to reclaim control over technology.
Test Your Focus: Can You Spend 10 Minutes With One Painting?
The New York Times online
2024-07-22
The act of focusing is both possible and valuable, researchers say, no matter how intimidating or pointless it might seem. That’s particularly important in a world where typical office workers spend an average of less than a minute at a time on any one screen, according to research by Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and author of “Attention Span.” When you’re used to a manic social media feed, “it’s hard to pay attention to content that doesn’t change,” she said. … “We do many behaviors that are automatic,” she said. “Becoming aware of such automatic behaviors is a skill, and we can then better control where we place our attention.”
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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