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Expert programmers have fine-tuned cortical representations of source code

View ORCID ProfileYoshiharu Ikutani, Takatomi Kubo, View ORCID ProfileSatoshi Nishida, Hideaki Hata, View ORCID ProfileKenichi Matsumoto, View ORCID ProfileKazushi Ikeda, View ORCID ProfileShinji Nishimoto
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.28.923953
Yoshiharu Ikutani
Graduate School of Science and Technology, Division of Information Science, Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), Ikoma, Nara 630-0192, Japan
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Takatomi Kubo
Graduate School of Science and Technology, Division of Information Science, Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), Ikoma, Nara 630-0192, Japan
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  • For correspondence: takatomi-k@is.naist.jp
Satoshi Nishida
Center for Information and Neural Networks (CiNet), National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Suita, Osaka 565-0871, Japan
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Hideaki Hata
Graduate School of Science and Technology, Division of Information Science, Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), Ikoma, Nara 630-0192, Japan
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Kenichi Matsumoto
Graduate School of Science and Technology, Division of Information Science, Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), Ikoma, Nara 630-0192, Japan
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Kazushi Ikeda
Graduate School of Science and Technology, Division of Information Science, Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), Ikoma, Nara 630-0192, Japan
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Shinji Nishimoto
Center for Information and Neural Networks (CiNet), National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Suita, Osaka 565-0871, Japan
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  • ORCID record for Shinji Nishimoto
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ABSTRACT

Expertise enables humans to achieve outstanding performance on domain-specific tasks, and programming is no exception. Many 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 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 source-code categorization. Our results suggest that programming expertise is built up on fine-tuned cortical representations specialized for the domain of programming.

Footnotes

  • https://github.com/Yoshiharu-Ikutani/DecodingCodeFromTheBrain

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted January 29, 2020.
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Expert programmers have fine-tuned cortical representations of source code
Yoshiharu Ikutani, Takatomi Kubo, Satoshi Nishida, Hideaki Hata, Kenichi Matsumoto, Kazushi Ikeda, Shinji Nishimoto
bioRxiv 2020.01.28.923953; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.28.923953
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Expert programmers have fine-tuned cortical representations of source code
Yoshiharu Ikutani, Takatomi Kubo, Satoshi Nishida, Hideaki Hata, Kenichi Matsumoto, Kazushi Ikeda, Shinji Nishimoto
bioRxiv 2020.01.28.923953; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.28.923953

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