This paper provides a study using Electroencephalography (EEG) to investigate the brain
activity during code comprehension tasks. Three different code complexity levels according
to five complexity metrics were considered. The use of EEG for this purpose is relevant,
since the existing studies were mostly focused on neuroimaging techniques. Using Leave-
One-Subject-Out cross-validation procedure for 30 subjects, it was found that the features
related with the Gamma activity were the most common in all the folds. Regarding the brain …

This study was developed on behalf of the on-going project BASE, Biofeedback Augmented
Software Engineering (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-031581), which aims at monitoring cognitive
functions of the brain during code development to detect possible bugs that might occur due
to shifts in the emotional condition of the subject. Specifically, the goal of this initial study is
to investigate the brain activity during code comprehension through the analysis of
Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals acquired from multiple volunteers and try to establish …