Beacons in computer program comprehension
International Journal of Man-Machine Studies
Unified theories of cognition
Program understanding and the concept assignment problem
Communications of the ACM
Studying the language and structure in non-programmers' solutions to programming problems
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
Software design---cognitive aspects
Software design---cognitive aspects
Learning where to look: location learning in graphical user interfaces
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Cognitive Dimensions of Notations: Design Tools for Cognitive Technology
CT '01 Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Cognitive Technology: Instruments of Mind
The human-computer interaction handbook
Fifteen years of psychology in software engineering: Individual differences and cognitive science
ICSE '84 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Software engineering
Psychological complexity of computer programs: an experimental methodology
ACM SIGPLAN Notices
An eye-tracking methodology for characterizing program comprehension processes
Proceedings of the 2006 symposium on Eye tracking research & applications
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Faith, hope, and love: an essay on software science's neglect of human factors
Proceedings of the ACM international conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications
Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools
Benefits and barriers of user evaluation in software engineering research
Proceedings of the 2011 ACM international conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications
Empirical Studies of Programming Knowledge
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
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Programming language and library designers often debate the usability of particular design choices. These choices may impact many developers, yet scientific evidence for them is rarely provided. Cognitive models of program comprehension have existed for over thirty years, but the lack of quantitative (operational) validations for their internal components limits their utility for usability studies. To ease the burden of quantifying these existing models, we recommend using the ACT-R cognitive architecture - a simulation framework for psychological models. In this paper, we review the history of cognitive modeling in the psychology of programming. We provide an overview of the ACT-R cognitive architecture, and show how it could be used to fill in the gaps of an existing, yet incomplete, quantitative model (the Cognitive Complexity Metric). Lastly, we discuss the potential benefits and challenges associated with building a comprehensive cognitive model on top of a cognitive architecture.