Mental Representations Constructed by Experts and Novices in Object-Oriented Program Comprehension

TL;DR

This paper develops a cognitive model for understanding object-oriented programs, examining how experts and novices construct different mental representations and how these evolve with experience.

Contribution

It extends the text understanding model to object-oriented programming, analyzing the impact of expertise on mental representations in program comprehension.

Findings

Experts and novices differ in their mental representations.

Expertise influences the construction of textbase and situation models.

Representations evolve differently over time based on experience.

Abstract

Previous studies on program comprehension were carried out largely in the context of procedural languages. Our purpose is to develop and evaluate a cognitive model of object-oriented (OO) program understanding. Our model is based on the van Dijk and Kintsch's model of text understanding (1983). One key aspect of this theoretical approach is the distinction between two kinds of representation the reader might construct from a text: the textbase and the situation model. On the basis of results of an experiment we have conducted, we evaluate the cognitive validity of this distinction in OO program understanding. We examine how the construction of these two representations is differentially affected by the programmer's expertise and how they evolve differentially over time.