A Look into Programmers’ Heads

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Abstract
Program comprehension is an important, but hard to measure cognitive process. This makes it difficult to provide suitable programming languages, tools, or coding conventions to support developers in their everyday work. Here, we explore whether functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is feasible for soundly measuring program comprehension. To this end, we observed 17 participants inside an fMRI scanner while they were comprehending source code. The results show a clear, distinct activation of five brain regions, which are related to working memory, attention, and language processing, which all fit well to our understanding of program comprehension. Furthermore, we found reduced activity in the default mode network, indicating the cognitive effort necessary for program comprehension. We also observed that familiarity with Java as underlying programming language reduced cognitive effort during program comprehension. To gain confidence in the results and the method, we replicated the study with 11 new participants and largely confirmed our findings. Our results encourage us and, hopefully, others to use fMRI to observe programmers and, in the long run, answer questions, such as: How should we train programmers? Can we train someone to become an excellent programmer? How effective are new languages and tools for program comprehension?
Funding Information
  • DFG (SI 2045/2-1, BR 2267/7-1)
  • Bavarian State Ministry of Education, Science
  • DFG (AP 206/4, AP 206/5, AP 206/6)
  • National Science Foundation (1318808, 1552944)
  • AFRL and DARPA (FA8750-16-2-0042)
  • ERC (#203099)
  • National Science Foundation (1755762)

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