Decoding the Representation of Code in the Brain: An fMRI Study of Code Review and Expertise

@article{Floyd2017DecodingTR,
  title={Decoding the Representation of Code in the Brain: An fMRI Study of Code Review and Expertise},
  author={Benjamin Floyd and Tyler Santander and Westley Weimer},
  journal={2017 IEEE/ACM 39th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)},
  year={2017},
  pages={175-186}
}
Subjective judgments in software engineering tasks are of critical importance but can be difficult to study with conventional means. Medical imaging techniques hold the promise of relating cognition to physical activities and brain structures. In a controlled experiment involving 29 participants, we examine code comprehension, code review and prose review using functional magnetic resonance imaging. We find that the neural representations of programming languages vs. natural languages are… 
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