Effects of Experience on Gaze Behavior during Program Animation (original) (raw)

Gaze Evidence for Different Activities in Program Understanding

2012

We present an empirical study that illustrates the potential of dual eye-tracking to detect successful understanding and social processes during pair-programming. The gaze of forty pairs of programmers was recorded during a program understanding task. An analysis of the gaze transitions between structural elements of the code, declarations of identifiers and expressions shows that pairs with better understanding do less systematic execution of the code and more "tracing" of the data flow by alternating between identifiers and expressions. Interaction consists of moments where partners' attention converges on the same same part of the code and moments where it diverges. Moments of convergence are accompanied by more systematic execution of the code and less transitions among identifiers and expressions.

User-adaptive explanatory program visualization: evaluation and insights from eye movements

User Modeling and User-adapted Interaction, 2010

User-adaptive visualization and explanatory visualization have been suggested to increase educational effectiveness of program visualization. This paper presents an attempt to assess the value of these two approaches. The results of a controlled experiment indicate that explanatory visualization allows students to substantially increase the understanding of a new programming topic. Furthermore, an educational application that features explanatory visualization and employs a user model to track users’ progress allows students to interact with a larger amount of material than an application which does not follow users’ activity. However, no support for the difference in short-term knowledge gain between the two applications is found. Nevertheless, students admit that they prefer the version that estimates and visualizes their progress and adapts the learning content to their level of understanding. They also use the application’s estimation to pace their work. The differences in eye movement patterns between the applications employing adaptive and non-adaptive explanatory visualizations are investigated as well. Gaze-based measures show that adaptive visualization captivates attention more than its non-personalized counterpart and is more interesting to students. Natural language explanations also accumulate a big portion of students’ attention. Furthermore, the results indicate that working memory span can mediate the perception of adaptation. It is possible that user-adaptation in an educational context provides a different service to people with different mental processing capabilities.

An eye-tracking methodology for characterizing program comprehension processes

Proceedings of the 2006 symposium on Eye tracking research & applications - ETRA '06, 2006

Program comprehension processes have previously been studied using methodologies such as think-aloud or comprehension summary analysis. Eye-tracking, however, has not been previously widely applied to studies of behavioral aspects of programming. We present a study in which program comprehension was investigated with a help of a remote eye-tracker. Novice and intermediate programmers used a program visualization tool to aid their comprehension while the location of fixations, fixation durations and attention switching between the areas of interest were recorded. In this paper 1) we propose an approach how to investigate trends in repeated-measures sparse-data of few cases captured by an eyetracker and 2) using this technique, we characterize the development of program comprehension strategies during dynamic program visualization with help of eye-movement data.

A Survey on the Usage of Eye-Tracking in Computer Programming

ACM Computing Surveys, 2019

Traditional quantitative research methods of data collection in programming, such as questionnaires and interviews, are the most common approaches for researchers in this field. However, in recent years, eye-tracking has been on the rise as a new method of collecting evidence of visual attention and the cognitive process of programmers. Eye-tracking has been used by researchers in the field of programming to analyze and understand a variety of tasks such as comprehension and debugging. In this article, we will focus on reporting how experiments that used eye-trackers in programming research are conducted, and the information that can be collected from these experiments. In this mapping study, we identify and report on 63 studies, published between 1990 and June 2017, collected and gathered via manual search on digital libraries and databases related to computer science and computer engineering. Among the five main areas of research interest are program comprehension and debugging, w...