As software pervades more and more areas of our professional and personal lives, there is an ever-increasing need to maintain software, and for programmers to be able to efficiently write and understand program code. In the first study of its kind, we analyze fixation-related potentials (FRPs) to explore the online processing of program code patterns that are ambiguous to programmers, but not the computer (so-called atoms of confusion), and their underlying neurocognitive mechanisms in an ecologically valid setting. Relative to unambiguous counterparts in program code, atoms of confusion elicit a late frontal positivity with a duration of about 400 to 700 ms after first looking at the atom of confusion. As the frontal positivity shows high resemblance with an event-related potential (ERP) component found during natural language processing that is elicited by unexpected but plausible words in sentence context, we take these data to suggest that the brain engages similar neurocognitive mechanisms in response to unexpected and informative inputs in program code and in natural language. In both domains, these inputs lead to an update of a comprehender's situation model that is essential for information extraction from a quickly unfolding input.

翻译：随着软件日益渗透到我们职业和个人生活的各个领域，对软件维护的需求不断增长，程序员需要能够高效编写和理解程序代码。在这项开创性研究中，我们通过分析注视相关电位，探索在生态效度较高的环境中，程序员对程序代码中模糊模式（计算机可识别但程序员易混淆的所谓"困惑原子"）的在线加工过程及其潜在的神经认知机制。相较于程序代码中的明确对应结构，困惑原子会诱发一个持续约400至700毫秒的晚期额叶正波。由于该额叶正波与自然语言加工中发现的事件相关电位成分高度相似——后者由句子语境中意外但合理的词汇所诱发——我们认为这些数据表明，大脑在处理程序代码和自然语言中的意外且具信息性的输入时，会调用相似的神经认知机制。在这两个领域中，此类输入都会促使理解者更新其情境模型，这对于从快速展开的输入中提取信息至关重要。