Related papers: Relating Reading, Visualization, and Coding for Ne…
Novice programmers often struggle to understand how code executes and to form the abstract mental models necessary for effective problem-solving, challenges that are amplified in large, diverse introductory courses where students'…
Reading code is an essential activity in software maintenance and evolution. Several studies with human subjects have investigated how different factors, such as the employed programming constructs and naming conventions, can impact code…
Measuring code understandability is both highly relevant and exceptionally challenging. This paper proposes a dynamic code understandability assessment method, which estimates a personalized code understandability score from the perspective…
Neurons in the brain represent information in their collective activity. The fidelity of this neural population code depends on whether and how variability in the response of one neuron is shared with other neurons. Two decades of studies…
Websites are frequently used by programmers to support the development process. This paper investigates programmer-Web interactions when coding, and combines observations of behaviour with assessments of the resulting source code. We report…
Previous works from research and industry have proposed a spatial representation of code in a canvas, arguing that a navigational code space confers developers the freedom to organise elements according to their understanding. By allowing…
Problem-driven visualization work is rooted in deeply understanding the data, actors, processes, and workflows of a target domain. However, an individual's personality traits and cognitive abilities may also influence visualization use.…
Human learning is a complex process in which future behavior is altered via the reorganization of brain activity and connectivity. It remains unknown whether activity and connectivity differentially reorganize during learning, and, if so,…
Brain decoding is a field of computational neuroscience that uses measurable brain activity to infer mental states or internal representations of perceptual inputs. Therefore, we propose a novel approach to brain decoding that also relies…
Emerging alongside generative AI and the broader trend of AI-assisted coding, the term "vibe coding" refers to creating software via natural language prompts rather than direct code authorship. This approach promises to democratize software…
Neural decoding, the process of understanding how brain activity corresponds to different stimuli, has been a primary objective in cognitive sciences. Over the past three decades, advances in functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and…
Among the most impressive recent applications of neural decoding is the visual representation decoding, where the category of an object that a subject either sees or imagines is inferred by observing his/her brain activity. Even though…
Research aimed at scaling up neuroscience inspired learning algorithms for neural networks is accelerating. Recently, a key research area has been the study of energy-based learning algorithms such as predictive coding, due to their…
Program comprehension is an essential activity in software engineering. Not only does it often challenge professionals, but it can also hinder novices from advancing their programming skills. Gaze, an emerging modality in developer tools,…
Many students in introductory programming courses fare poorly in the code writing tasks of the final summative assessment. Such tasks are designed to assess whether novices have developed the analytical skills to translate from the given…
Incorporating computer programming exercises into introductory physics is a delicate task that involves a number of choices that may have an effect on student learning. We present a "hybrid" approach that speaks to a number of common…
Programming digital devices and developing software is an important professional qualification, which contributes to employment opportunities. Despite this fact, there is a remarkable shortage in suitable human resources. In this context,…
Generative AI agents are reshaping human-computer interaction, shifting users from direct task execution to supervising machine-driven actions, especially the rise of "vibe coding" in programming. Yet little is known about how screen reader…
Introductory programming courses often emphasize mastering syntax and basic constructs before progressing to more complex and interesting programs. This bottom-up approach can be frustrating for novices, shifting the focus away from problem…
Understanding brain function, constructing computational models and engineering neural prosthetics require assessing two problems, namely encoding and decoding, but their relation remains controversial. For decades, the encoding problem has…