PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Ikutani, Yoshiharu
AU  - Kubo, Takatomi
AU  - Nishida, Satoshi
AU  - Hata, Hideaki
AU  - Matsumoto, Kenichi
AU  - Ikeda, Kazushi
AU  - Nishimoto, Shinji
TI  - Expert Programmers Have Fine-Tuned Cortical Representations of Source Code
AID  - 10.1523/ENEURO.0405-20.2020
DP  - 2021 Jan 01
TA  - eneuro
PG  - ENEURO.0405-20.2020
VI  - 8
IP  - 1
4099  - http://www.eneuro.org/content/8/1/ENEURO.0405-20.2020.short
4100  - http://www.eneuro.org/content/8/1/ENEURO.0405-20.2020.full
SO  - eNeuro2021 Jan 01; 8
AB  - Expertise enables humans to achieve outstanding performance on domain-specific tasks, and programming is no exception. Many studies have shown that expert programmers exhibit remarkable differences from novices in behavioral performance, knowledge structure, and selective attention. However, the underlying differences in the brain of programmers are still unclear. We here address this issue by associating the cortical representation of source code with individual programming expertise using a data-driven decoding approach. This approach enabled us to identify seven brain regions, widely distributed in the frontal, parietal, and temporal cortices, that have a tight relationship with programming expertise. In these brain regions, functional categories of source code could be decoded from brain activity and the decoding accuracies were significantly correlated with individual behavioral performances on a source-code categorization task. Our results suggest that programming expertise is built on fine-tuned cortical representations specialized for the domain of programming.