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Our goal is to identify brain regions involved in comprehending computerprograms. We use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigatetwo candidate systems of brain regions which may support this -- the MultipleDemand (MD) system, known to respond to a range of cognitively demanding tasks,and the Language system (LS), known to primarily respond to language stimuli.We devise experiment conditions to isolate the act of code comprehension, andemploy a state-of-the-art method to locate brain systems of interest. Weadminister these experiments in Python (24 participants) and Scratch Jr. (19participants) - which provides a visual interface to programming, thuseliminating the effect of text in code comprehension. From this robustexperiment setup, we find that the Language system is not consistently involvedin code comprehension, while the MD is. Further, we find no other brain regionsbeyond those in the MD to be responsive to code. We also find that variablenames, the control flow used in the program, and the types of operationsperformed do not affect brain responses. We discuss the implications of ourfindings on the software engineering and CS education communities.

Program Comprehension Does Not Primarily Rely On the Language Centers of the Human Brain