Synchronized Analysis of Eye Movement and EEG during Program Comprehension

Appropriate support for program comprehension contributes to efficient software development. Several previous studies used bio-information such as brain activity to classify the inner-state of programmer without interruption. In this paper, we measure programmer's brain waves and eye movement simultaneously while they comprehend the source code. In the experiment, we analyze difference of time-series brain wave features between success/failure for source code comprehension task. The result of the experiment showed the participants who success source code comprehension significantly increased power spectrum of α wave with the time passage. Also the eye movements of the succeed participants shift their focus of fixation from specification to source code in early time. Synchronized analysis of failed programmer shows similar but slow pattern of EEG and eye movement changes compared with succeed programmer.