ArticleeNeuro
Expert Programmers Have Fine-Tuned Cortical Representations of Source Code.
Article in eNeuro. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed, 19 citations in OpenAlex.
- Learning to Program "Recycles" Preexisting Frontoparietal Population Codes of Logical Algorithms.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Article
- Changes in functional brain activity patterns associated with computer programming learning in novices.Brain structure & function · 2023Article
- Reading and Calculation Neural Systems and Their Weighted Adaptive Use for Programming Skills.Neural plasticity · 2021Review
- Comprehension of computer code relies primarily on domain-general executive brain regions.eLife · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Expertise enables humans to achieve outstanding performance on domain-specific tasks, and programming is no exception. Many studies have shown that expert programmers exhibit remarkable differences from novices in behavioral performance, knowledge structure, and selective attention. However, the underlying differences in the brain of programmers are still unclear. We here address this issue by associating the cortical representation of source code with individual programming expertise using a data-driven decoding approach. This approach enabled us to identify seven brain regions, widely distributed in the frontal, parietal, and temporal cortices, that have a tight relationship with programming expertise. In these brain regions, functional categories of source code could be decoded from brain activity and the decoding accuracies were significantly correlated with individual behavioral performances on a source-code categorization task. Our results suggest that programming expertise is built on fine-tuned cortical representations specialized for the domain of programming.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.