Fixation-related potentials reveal that confusing program code elicits a late frontal positivity
For software engineers and psycholinguists, this provides the first neurophysiological evidence linking confusing code to brain responses, with implications for programming tools and interdisciplinary research.
This study used fixation-related potentials (FRPs) to show that confusing program code (atoms of confusion) elicits a late frontal positivity (400-700 ms) compared to clean code, suggesting similar neurocognitive mechanisms to those in natural language processing for unexpected but plausible inputs.
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.