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
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
What podcasts do to our brains
Vox online
2025-12-03
Listening to podcasts, relaxing as it may seem, depletes your cognitive resources. “One of the best things that people can do is to take a break, go outside in nature,” said Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine and author of Attention Span. “Just being away from media and using our full range of senses can help restore our cognitive resources.”
Can Your Attention Span Really 'Break'? Experts Weigh In
Newsweek online
2025-09-11
Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine and author of Attention Span, has been tracking our screen use for two decades. "I found that attention spans declined from an average of 2 1/2 minutes in 2004 to an average of 47 seconds from 2016–2020," Mark told Newsweek.
This Extremely Cute Bean Wants to Help You Stop Doomscrolling
WIRED online
2025-08-22
Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Attention Span, has been tracking and studying our ability to focus for nearly two decades. Thanks to a constant barrage of things like mobile phones, social media, shortform video, and powerful algorithms like those on TikTok, our attention spans are on the decline.
Summer picks: Where did our attention spans go, and can we get them back? – podcast
The Guardian – Science Weekly online
2025-07-29
Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, has been studying our waning attention spans for 20 years. In this episode from January 2025, she tells Madeleine Finlay why she believes our powers of concentration are not beyond rescue, and reveals her top tips for finding focus
I visited Universal Studios and people were on their phones everywhere—even rollercoasters: That habit is ‘really hard to break,’ expert says
CNBC Make It online
2025-07-04
I reached out to Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and author of “Attention Span,” to find out why people just can’t pull themselves away [from their phones] even at a place as stimulating as Universal Studios — and what it’s doing to their experience. … When people are on their phones, they are “not living the moment,” Mark says. … Not only are they missing out on the present, when people are not giving the moment their full attention, “they’re not able to develop memories from their experience,” Mark adds.
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.
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.
