Brain activity measurement during program comprehension with NIRS
Abstract
Near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) has been used as a low cost, noninvasive method to measure brain activity. In this paper, we experiment to measure the effects of variables and controls in a source code to the brain activity in program comprehension. The measurement results are evaluated after noise reduction and normalization to statistical analysis. As the result of the experiment, significant differences in brain activity were observed at a task that requires memorizing variables to understand a code snippet. On the other hand, no significant differences between different levels of mental arithmetic tasks were observed. We conclude that the frontal pole reflects workload to short-term memory caused by variables without affected from calculation.
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Only a handful of previous studies have looked at the neural basis of code processing.
“Only a handful of previous studies have looked at the neural basis of code processing (Duraes et al., 2016; Floyd et al., 2017; Ikutani and Uwano, 2014; Peitek et al., 2018; Siegmund et al., 2014; Huang et al., 2019).”
From Computer code comprehension shares neural resources with formal logical inference in the fronto-parietal network (2020) · cites this paper as Ikutani and Uwano, 2014
Cites
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On the suitability of near-infrared (NIR) systems for next-generation brain–computer interfaces
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Measurement of Brain Function Using Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS)
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Toward measuring program comprehension with functional magnetic resonance imaging
Siegmund, J., Brechmann, A., Apel, S., Kästner, C., Liebig, J., Leich, T., & Saake, G. (2012) · ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE) · doi:10.1145/2393596.2393624 · Cited by 28 · see citing works
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Liu, Y.-F., Kim, J., Wilson, C., & Bedny, M. (2020) · eLife · doi:10.7554/elife.59340 · Cited by 64 · see citing works
- Authors
- Ikutani, Y., & Uwano, H.
- Affiliations
- National Institute of Technology, Nara College (JP)
- Venue
- 15th IEEE/ACIS International Conference on Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Networking and Parallel/Distributed Computing (SNPD)
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Published
- 2014-06
- Pages
- 1-6
- OpenAlex
- W2174068427
- Cited by
- 43
- References
- 8
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 4 · 2022: 1 · 2021: 6 · 2020: 8 · 2019: 6 · 2018: 5 · 2017: 2 · 2016: 2
- FWCI
- 3.47
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- ACIS International Conference on Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Networking and Parallel/Distributed Computing (SNPD) (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (24700038)
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging › Optical Imaging and Spectroscopy Techniques
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neuroscience, Education and Cognitive Function
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Cognitive Computing and Networks
- Keywords
- program comprehension, near-infrared spectroscopy, brain activity, source code reading, mental arithmetic, short-term memory, frontal pole, mental workload, noise reduction
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