Abstract
Computer programming is a novel cognitive tool that has transformed modern society. What cognitive and neural mechanisms support this skill? Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate two candidate brain systems: the multiple demand (MD) system, typically recruited during math, logic, problem solving, and executive tasks, and the language system, typically recruited during linguistic processing. We examined MD and language system responses to code written in Python, a text-based programming language (Experiment 1) and in ScratchJr, a graphical programming language (Experiment 2); for both, we contrasted responses to code problems with responses to content-matched sentence problems. We found that the MD system exhibited strong bilateral responses to code in both experiments, whereas the language system responded strongly to sentence problems, but weakly or not at all to code problems. Thus, the MD system supports the use of novel cognitive tools even when the input is structurally similar to natural language.
Highlights
The human mind is endowed with a remarkable ability to support novel cognitive skills, such as reading, writing, map-based navigation, mathematical reasoning, and scientific logic
In Experiment 2 (19 participants, 12 women), code problems were written in ScratchJr, an introductory graphical programming language developed for children aged 5–7 (Bers, 2018)
We tested the role of two candidate neural systems in computer code comprehension: the domaingeneral multiple demand (MD) system (Duncan, 2010), which has been linked to diverse executive demands and implicated in math and logic (e.g., Amalric and Dehaene, 2019; Goel, 2007; Monti et al, 2007; Monti et al, 2009), and the language-selective system (Fedorenko et al, 2011), which has been linked to lexical and combinatorial linguistic processes (e.g., Bautista and Wilson, 2016; Fedorenko et al, 2010; Fedorenko et al, 2012; Fedorenko et al, 2020; Keller et al, 2001; Mollica et al, 2020)
Summary
The human mind is endowed with a remarkable ability to support novel cognitive skills, such as reading, writing, map-based navigation, mathematical reasoning, and scientific logic. The ability to flexibly instruct programmable machines has led to a rapid technological transformation of communities across the world (Ensmenger, 2012); little is known about the cognitive and neural systems that underlie computer programming skills. We investigate which neural systems support one critical aspect of computer programming: computer code comprehension. We refer to a set of cognitive processes that allow programmers to interpret individual program tokens (such as keywords, variables, and function names), combine them to extract the meaning of program statements, and, combine the statements into a mental representation of the entire program. It is important to note that code comprehension may be cognitively and neurally separable from cognitive operations required to process program content, that is, the actual operations described by code. Most of the time, processing program content recruits a range of cognitive processes known as computational thinking (Wing, 2006; Wing, 2011), which include algorithm identification, pattern generalization/
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