Toward Measuring Program Comprehension with Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Overview

In cognitive neuroscience, fMRI is an often used technqiue to visualize internal cognitive processes. We set out to evaluate whether we can use fMRI to measure program comprehension. To this end, we conducted two pilot studies to select suitable material.

Our paper about the study at the International Conference on Software Engineering

Tasks

All tasks we used can be downloaded here

Tasks for session in scanner. First comprehension task, followed by syntax task in same row:

 

Comprehension task	Syntax task
Factorial	Decimal to binary
Check if substring is contained	Cross sum
Find largest in list of numbers	Reverse array
Reverse string	Check if substring is contained
Swap	Find largest of three numbers
Power	Reverse string
Median	Factorial
Reverse array	Swap
Cross sum	Median
Find largest of three numbers	Power
Count same chars in two strings	Find largest of three numbers
Decimal to binary	Count same chars in two strings

First Pilot Study

The results of the first pilot study, that is, response times and correctness, are available here

Second Pilot Study

The results of the second pilot study, that is, response times and correctness, are available here

Session in Scanner

Answer of the participants after the session in the scanner, including their programming experience.
Answers (csv)

Confounding parameters and how we managed them (Framework for Measuring Program Comprehension for more details).
Confounding parameters (pdf)