Program Comprehension and Implications of Human Navigational Approaches

Cognitive scientists, psychologists, and other researchers have endeavored over the past three decades to identify the cognitive functions underpinning human navigation and its possible correlations with other characteristics. The answer to the basic question of how/why some people are good at following directions and some people are not, is yet to be determined conclusively. The scope of this research work included both theoretical and empirical studies of human direction sensitivity and the cognitive tests that attempt to test hypotheses about individual differences in spatial/temporal attention spans as well as a set of program comprehension questionnaire-based tests about the debugging/testing of computer programs and program comprehension. This work was done in the context of the relevant cognitive-based perceptual and spatial tests. The test results obtained suggest that programmers' directional detection skills appear to have some correlations with their program comprehension abilities.