The Eye of the Beholder: What Can Eye-Tracking Data Reveal about Code?

The Eye of the Beholder: What Can Eye-Tracking Data Reveal about Code?

by Sven Apel, Norman Peitek, Marvin Wyrich, Annabelle Bergum, Tobias Dick, Christian Hechtl, Anna-Maria Maurer, Kallistos Weis, Alisa Welter

The pivotal role of software in our modern world imposes strong requirements on quality, correctness, and reliability of software systems. The ability to understand program code plays a key role for programmers to fulfill these requirements. Despite significant progress, research on program comprehension has had a fundamental limitation: program comprehension is a cognitive process that cannot be directly observed, which leaves considerable room for (mis)interpretation, uncertainty, and confounding factors. Thus, central questions such as “What makes a good programmer?” and “How should we program?” are surprisingly difficult to answer based on the state of the art.

Recently, researchers began to lift research on program comprehension to a new level. The key idea is to leverage recent methods from cognitive neuroscience to obtain insights into the cognitive processes involved in program comprehension. Opening the “black box” of human cognition will lead to a breakthrough in understanding the why and how of program comprehension and to a completely new perspective and methodology of measuring program comprehension, with direct implications for programming methodology, language design, and education. One of these novel methods is eye tracking, a small device observing the focus of a programmer’s eyes as x and y coordinates on the screen over time. Using this method we can answer research questions on visual attention, comprehension strategy, and differences between programmers (such as expertise).

In this seminar, you will be able to experience major steps of an eye-tracking study. You will review eyetracking literature and pose your own research questions based on existing study. Next, you can exploratively answer your research question by analyzing an existing set of eye tracking data. Specifically, each participant has to perform a literature search and propose a set of research questions targeting code comprehension measured with eye tracking. In the next step, we will provide you with real world eye-tracking data from our prior experiments. Subsequently, the research questions, the results of the analysis, and the interpretation of the results have to be incorporated into a presentation and a written thesis. To aid the literature search, the analysis, and the presentation, this seminar includes multiple preparatory sessions at the beginning of the semester.

The student presentations will be held on-site on two days in March (10. and 11.03.2025).
All other sessions will take place on-site at the university on Thursdays 12:15 PM - 2:00 PM.
Participation in all sessions is mandatory.
The first meeting will take place on Thursday November 07, at 12:15 PM.
Further information will be provided via e-mail after registration.