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May 1, 2005
"A Glimpse of Expert Programmers’ Mental Imagery" by Marian Petre and Alan F. Blackwell
This paper attempts to find correlations between different experts' mental imagery of a design. The experiment consisted of ten subjects all of which have 10+ years of experience. They were each asked to design a solution to one of four problems present, but they did not have to implement the solution. The experiment also had an interviewer present who was questioning the subject as to what they see, hear, or what they are imagining. The questions borke down the images into 3 categories: verbal imagery, visual imagery, and auditory imagery.
They found that there were several similarities between the different subjects' mental imagery. The similarities are as follows: each entity in the imagery had a label, each subject had multiple images, each image was dynamic yet could still be controlled such as pausing the image or returning it to its previous state, and the part of the image the subject had his/her attention on would be in focus while everything else was out of focus. Given these similarities the experimenters concluded that there is commonality among mental imagery between experts "suggesting that there are accessible
lessons to be elicited about how programmers construct solutions."
This is important to our study because it gives us another characteristic of expert programmers that we can probe during the experiment. It's also interesting to see that mental imagery is actually used to design a part of the program other than the GUI. The concept is interesting but the paper itself is pretty dry.
Posted by Teerawat at May 1, 2005 6:03 PM
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