RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 The neural bases of program comprehension: a coordinate-based fMRI meta-analysis
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2021.04.15.439937
DO 10.1101/2021.04.15.439937
A1 Ikutani, Yoshiharu
A1 Itoh, Takeshi D.
A1 Kubo, Takatomi
YR 2021
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/04/16/2021.04.15.439937.abstract
AB The understanding of brain activity during program comprehension have advanced thanks to noninvasive neuroimaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). However, individual neuroimaging studies of program comprehension often provided inconsistent results and made it difficult to identify the neural bases. To identify the essential brain regions, this study performed a small meta-analysis on recent fMRI studies of program comprehension using multilevel kernel density analysis (MKDA). Our analysis identified a set of brain regions consistently activated in various program comprehension tasks. These regions consisted of three clusters, each of which centered at the left inferior frontal gyrus pars triangularis (IFG Tri), posterior part of middle temporal gyrus (pMTG), and right middle frontal gyrus (MFG). Additionally, subsequent analyses revealed relationships among the activation patterns in the previous studies and multiple cognitive functions. These findings suggest that program comprehension mainly recycles the language-related networks and partially employs other domain-general resources in the human brain.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.