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Poster D in Poster Session D: Wednesday, August 5, 2:00 – 3:45 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Semantic Neighborhood Density and Eye Gaze Time in Human Programmer Attention

Robert Wallace¹, Emory Michaels¹, Yu Huang², Collin McMillan¹; ¹University of Notre Dame, ²Vanderbilt University

Presenter: Robert Wallace

This paper studies the relationship between human eye gaze time on words in source code and the Semantic Neighborhood Density (SND) of those words. Human eye gaze time is a popular way to quantify human attention such as the importance of words people read and the cognitive effort people exert. Meanwhile, SND is a measure of how similar a word is in meaning to other words in the same context. SND has a long history where it has been connected to eye gaze time in various domains and helps explain human cognitive factors such as confusion and quality of reading comprehension. But SND carries an unknown and potentially unique meaning in software engineering. In this paper, we compute SND for tokens in source code that people viewed in two previous eye-tracking experiments, one in C and one in Java. We conduct a model-free analysis for statistical relationships between SND and gaze time. We found that words with high SND tend to have higher gaze time than low SND words, especially for low frequency words.

Topic Area: Methods, Tools, Theory & Neural Coding