Fixation-related potentials reveal that confusing program code elicits a late frontal positivity

TL;DR

This study uses fixation-related potentials to show that confusing program code triggers a late frontal positivity, indicating similar brain mechanisms as natural language processing for unexpected inputs.

Contribution

First to analyze neurocognitive responses to confusing code patterns, revealing parallels with language comprehension and informing interdisciplinary research.

Findings

Confusing code elicits a late frontal positivity 400-700 ms after first glance.

The brain processes confusing code similarly to unexpected words in language.

Results suggest shared neurocognitive mechanisms for language and code comprehension.

Abstract

As software pervades more and more areas of our professional and personal lives, there is an ever-increasing need to maintain software and for programmers to efficiently write and understand program code. In the first study of its kind, we analyze fixation-related potentials (FRPs) to explore the online processing of program code patterns that are confusing to programmers, but not to the computer (so-called atoms of confusion), and their underlying neurocognitive mechanisms in an ecologically valid setting. Relative to clean counterparts in program code without an atom of confusion, confusing code elicits a late frontal positivity of about 400 to 700 ms after first looking at the atom of confusion. This frontal positivity resembles an event-related potential (ERP) component found during natural language processing that is elicited by unexpected but plausible words in sentence context. Thus, we suggest that the brain engages similar neurocognitive mechanisms in response to unexpected and informative inputs in program code and in natural language. In both domains, these inputs update a comprehender's situation model, which is essential for information extraction from a quickly unfolding input. Our results have far-reaching implications for programming and pave the way for interdisciplinary collaborations between software engineering and psycholinguistics.