Identifying Effective Program Comprehension Strategies through Gaze Transitions over Syntactic Elements
2026-07-01 • Software Engineering
Software Engineering
AI summaryⓘ
The authors studied how programmers look at different parts of code to understand it better. Instead of just tracking where their eyes land on the screen, they mapped eye movements to parts of the code’s structure. They found that people who correctly solved programming tasks moved their eyes in more organized patterns through the code’s structure. This suggests that effective programmers follow a more systematic way of reading code.
program comprehensioneye-trackingabstract syntax treefixationgaze transitionsyntaxsoftware engineeringtask correctnessreading strategies
Authors
Kyogo Horikawa, Hidetake Uwano, Haruhiko Yoshioka
Abstract
Program comprehension is a central research topic in software engineering, focusing on how developers understand a program's structure, behavior, and intent. Eye-tracking studies have traditionally relied on display-based measurements, where gaze positions are represented as screen coordinates. However, syntax-based analyses have recently emerged. Prior work proposed methods to convert eye movements into transitions between nodes in an abstract syntax tree, but the relationship between task correctness and eye-movement features for specific syntactic elements remains unclear. This study converts eye-tracking data into transitions between syntactic nodes and analyzes fixation proportions and gaze transition patterns. We investigate the relationship between these patterns and task correctness, comparing correct and incorrect groups. Our results reveal distinct differences in gaze transition patterns between the two groups. In particular, successful participants exhibit more systematic transitions across syntactic elements, suggesting the use of structured reading strategies.