What does it take to be a modern-day coding whiz? Stellar math skills might be one of the first things to come to mind. But a new study published this week in Scientific Reports suggests there’s more to coding competency than the ability to crunch numbers.
Lead author Chantel Prat, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington, has spent years studying how brains learn. She had an inkling that people with strong language skills might also be good at learning computer programming — an idea that has been mentioned in a handful of prior studies, but has fallen short on data, especially in recent years.
So Prat and her colleagues recruited a group of native English speakers with no coding experience to take an introductory course in Python, a popular computer programming language. They took scans of their brains and gave them written tests to measure their aptitude for a variety of skills, and compared the results to how easily they learned to code. The researchers found that language aptitude, memory and reasoning play a bigger role in predicting how well someone will pick up a computer language — not how savvy they are with numbers.
