Identifying Effective Program Comprehension Strategies through Gaze Transitions over Syntactic Elements

2026-07-01

AI Summary

This study addresses the lack of understanding regarding how developers’ eye movements toward specific syntactic elements during program comprehension influence task accuracy. For the first time, it maps eye-tracking data onto Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) nodes to construct fixation transition sequences and systematically compares differences in fixation distributions and transition patterns between participants who answered correctly and those who did not. By integrating eye-tracking, AST alignment, transition modeling, and statistical analysis, the research reveals that successful developers employ more systematic and structured gaze strategies across syntactic nodes, significantly distinguishing them from their unsuccessful counterparts. This work provides the first empirical evidence at the syntactic level for the cognitive mechanisms underlying program comprehension and identifies key characteristics of effective code-reading strategies.

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.

Problem

• program comprehension
• eye-tracking
• syntactic elements
• gaze transitions
• task correctness

Innovation

• gaze transitions
• syntactic elements
• program comprehension
• eye-tracking
• abstract syntax tree