Paper Info
Title
What influences dwell time during source code reading?: analysis of element type and frequency as factors
Abstract
While knowledge about reading behavior in natural-language text is abundant, little is known about the visual attention distribution when reading source code of computer programs. Yet, this knowledge is important for teaching programming skills as well as designing IDEs and programming languages. We conducted a study in which 15 programmers with various expertise read short source codes and recorded their eye movements. In order to study attention distribution on code elements, we introduced the following procedure: First we (pre)-processed the eye movement data using log-transformation. Taking into account the word lengths, we then analyzed the time spent on different lexical elements. It shows that most attention is oriented towards understanding of identifiers, operators, keywords and literals, relatively little reading time is spent on separators. We further inspected the attention on keywords and provide a description of the gaze on these primary building blocks for any formal language. The analysis indicates that approaches from research on natural-language text reading can be applied to source code as well, however not without review.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1145/2578153.2578211
ETRA
Keywords
Field
DocType
code element,reading time,visual attention distribution,dwell time,element type,attention distribution,natural-language text,eye movement data,source code,eye movement,short source code,natural-language text reading,source code reading,eye tracking
Programming language,Identifier,Computer science,Source code,Eye tracking,Eye movement,Operator (computer programming),Artificial intelligence,Natural language processing,Program comprehension,Computer vision,Formal language,Gaze
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
8
0.49
8
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Teresa Busjahn11145.35
Roman Bednarik256148.77
Carsten Schulte339049.99