Expert Programmers Have Fine-Tuned Cortical Representations of Source Code
| Autor: | Hideaki Hata, Yoshiharu Ikutani, Takatomi Kubo, Kenichi Matsumoto, Satoshi Nishida, Shinji Nishimoto, Kazushi Ikeda |
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| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
Source code
Computer science Brain activity and meditation media_common.quotation_subject computer.software_genre brain decoding Domain (software engineering) program comprehension the neuroscience of programming medicine Humans Attention media_common Statement (computer science) Brain Mapping medicine.diagnostic_test business.industry General Neuroscience Program comprehension Representation (systemics) Brain General Medicine Magnetic Resonance Imaging functional magnetic resonance imaging Cognition and Behavior Categorization programming expertise Artificial intelligence Functional magnetic resonance imaging business computer Research Article: New Research Software Decoding methods Natural language processing |
| Zdroj: | eNeuro |
| ISSN: | 2373-2822 |
| DOI: | 10.1523/eneuro.0405-20.2020 |
| Popis: | Expertise enables humans to achieve outstanding performance on domain-specific tasks, and programming is no exception. Many studies have shown that expert programmers exhibit remarkable differences from novices in behavioral performance, knowledge structure, and selective attention. However, the underlying differences in the brain of programmers are still unclear. We here address this issue by associating the cortical representation of source code with individual programming expertise using a data-driven decoding approach. This approach enabled us to identify seven brain regions, widely distributed in the frontal, parietal, and temporal cortices, that have a tight relationship with programming expertise. In these brain regions, functional categories of source code could be decoded from brain activity and the decoding accuracies were significantly correlated with individual behavioral performances on a source-code categorization task. Our results suggest that programming expertise is built upon fine-tuned cortical representations specialized for the domain of programming. Significance Statement The expertise needed for programming has attracted increasing interest among researchers and educators in our computerized world. Many studies have demonstrated that expert programmers exhibit superior behavioral performance, knowledge structure, and selective attention; but how their brain accommodates such superiority is not well understood. In this paper we have recorded brain activities from subjects covering a wide range of programming expertise. The results show that functional categories of source code can be decoded from their brain activity and the decoding accuracies on the seven brain regions in frontal, parietal, temporal cortices are significantly correlated with individual behavioral performances. This study provides evidence that outstanding performances of expert programmers are associated with domain-specific cortical representations in these widely distributed brain areas. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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