Understanding the workplace experience is important in order to develop solutions to improve health, mood, and performance, and reduce stress. However, until recently, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral measurements of the workplace experience have been constrained by methodologies based on infrequent measurements or self-reports. The ongoing revolution in the development of sensor technologies is enabling new ways to measure human behavior in situ with precision. With a mixed-methods approach using sensors, along with EMA, computer logging, and repeated surveys, I will present a framework for measuring different attentional states. I will present results showing how attention focus, stress and affect are impacted by digital media use, and how attention focus varies over the workday. This research shows that there are consequences of having access to so many digital information sources: they compete for people’s attention, leading to continual attention switching among different information streams and devices. I will discuss the value and challenges of using sensor measures in situ to study and design for improved digital media use.
Gloria Mark is a Professor in the Department of Informatics, University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on studying how the use of digital technology impacts our lives in real-world contexts. She received her PhD in Psychology from Columbia University. Prior to UCI she worked at the German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD, now Fraunhofer Institute) and has been an ongoing visiting researcher at Microsoft Research since 2012, and has been a visiting researcher at IBM, National University of Singapore, and the MIT Media Lab. She was inducted into the ACM SIGCHI Academy and has been a Fulbright scholar. She was the general co-chair for the ACM CHI 2017 conference, and is on the editorial boards of the ACM TOCHI and Human-Computer Interaction journals. Her work has appeared in the popular press such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, the BBC, NPR, Time, The Wall Street Journal and she has presented her work at SXSW and the Aspen Ideas Festival.