Abstract
In this paper, we examine brain activity in program comprehension that contains the effects of 1) calculation, 2) memorizing variables, and 3) judging conditional branch. We measured Frontal pole of twenty subjects at three types code reading tasks and three level mental calculation tasks using NIRS. The result of the experiment showed a significantly higher brain activity at the variables-memorizing task. On the other hand, no significant difference was observed between different levels of mental calculation task. The results suggest that brain activity at Frontal pole indicate a workload of memorizing in program comprehension.
