Gloria Mark
Chancellor's Professor Informatics
- Irvine CA UNITED STATES
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
IBM Faculty Award
2013
Google Research Award
2014
ACM CHI Academy
2017
Education
The University of Michigan
MS
Biostatistics
1984
Columbia University
PhD
Psychology
1991
Affiliations
- Assoc. for Computing Machinery (ACM) : Member
- ACM SIGCHI
- Fulbright Association
Media Appearances
Digital habits that rob attention and energy — and how to combat them
NPR – Life Kit online
2026-07-30
I've spoken to researchers, like Gloria Mark at University of California, Irvine, who have studied how we switch our attention. One of the things she has seen is that if you've spent an hour switching from screen to screen, checking X, then Instagram and going over to email, even if in the next hour everything calms down and you want to sit down with a single article, you will start switching tasks yourself. So even if nobody else is interrupting you, you will start interrupting yourself.
The No. 1 way Americans spend their free time: It’s ‘always been a huge part’ of our culture
CNBC online
2026-07-23
Gloria Mark, a chancellor’s professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine …. believes the fast-paced nature of both traditional media and short-form content has negatively affected people’s attention spans, which can affect stress levels as well as quality of performance on an activity. When you’re trying to figure out what to do in your leisure time, “you can read books, you can walk in nature, you can play sports, you can have conversations with people,” she says. “Those things require us to have longer periods of attention.”
The Dark Side of Social Media Nobody Wants to Admit
Medium online
2026-06-14
Gloria Mark at UC Irvine has spent decades studying how digital interruptions affect cognitive performance. Her research has produced one of the most cited and most unsettling findings in attention science: after a digital interruption, it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to fully return to a complex task.
Manoush Zomorodi talks about her new book, 'Body Electric'
NPR – Morning Edition online
2026-05-05
“Actually, there's really interesting research that your brain gets into patterns, right? So let's say you have an hour where you are switching between tasks and you're answering email and looking at texts on your phone and all those things. Even if the next hour is calmer, you will get stuck in that pattern to the point where you'll start switching tasks just on your own. This is the work of a UC Irvine informatics researcher, Gloria Mark. She has found that 44% of the interruptions we experience - usually in the workplace - come from ourselves. So, no wonder we feel like we're our own worst enemy, right?” said Zomorodi.
Why we can’t sit alone with our thoughts anymore
The Washington Post online
2026-04-19
“It’s a habitual behavior, and many, many people are doing it,” says psychologist Gloria Mark, a professor in the department of informatics at the University of California at Irvine, and the author of the 2023 book “Attention Span.” “It’s a tough problem we’re in. We look around us and everybody’s got their AirPods in.” … When we fill all our spare moments with audio content, Mark says, especially if it’s lyric heavy or distracting, “we’re not giving our minds a chance to rest. Stress builds up when you don’t give your mind a chance to relax.”
Articles
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.