Measuring Program Comprehension with Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Programmers spend significant time comprehending source code everyday, so naturally, decades of research have been devoted to understanding and improving program comprehension. However, this research has still not completely unraveled what happens inside programmersâ heads when they work with source code. The problem is that program comprehension is an internal cognitive process that inherently eludes measurement. To shed light on this issue, we explored the feasibility of using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which has proved successful in cognitive neuroscience to understand cognitive processes in more depth.