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Quantifying programmers' mental workload during program comprehension based on cerebral blood flow measurement: a controlled experiment

Published: 31 May 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Program comprehension is a fundamental activity in software development that cannot be easily measured, as it is performed inside the human brain. Using a wearable Near Infra-red Spectroscopy (NIRS) device to measure cerebral blood flow, this paper tries to answer the question: Can the measurement of brain blood-flow quantify programmers' mental workload during program comprehension activities? We performed a controlled experiment with 10 subjects; 8 of them showed high cerebral blood flow while understanding strongly obfuscated programs (requiring high mental workload). This suggests the possibility of using NIRS to measure the mental workload of a person during software development activities.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ICSE Companion 2014: Companion Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering
May 2014
741 pages
ISBN:9781450327688
DOI:10.1145/2591062
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • TCSE: IEEE Computer Society's Tech. Council on Software Engin.

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New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 31 May 2014

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Author Tags

  1. Program comprehension
  2. cerebral blood flow measurement
  3. mental workload

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  • (2024)EEG as a potential ground truth for the assessment of cognitive state in software development activities: A multimodal imaging studyPLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.029910819:3(e0299108)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2024
  • (2024)Towards a Cognitive Model of Dynamic Debugging: Does Identifier Construction Matter?IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2024.346522250:11(3007-3021)Online publication date: Nov-2024
  • (2024)The relationship between computational thinking and mental rotation ability: a functional near-infrared spectroscopy studyJournal of Cognitive Psychology10.1080/20445911.2024.237117636:6(754-768)Online publication date: Jul-2024
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  • (2022)Correlates of programmer efficacy and their link to experience: a combined EEG and eye-tracking studyProceedings of the 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3540250.3549084(120-131)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2022
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