Creative minds at the keyboard: eye-tracking insights into how developers think and code

Software development is a multifaceted process that blends problem-solving with coding to create novel solutions. While creativity is central to programming practice, little is known about how it influences programmers’ cognitive and behavioral strategies. To explore this understudied aspect of programming, we conducted a controlled eye-tracking study with 40 participants to examine how creativity shapes programmers’ cognitive strategies. We assessed developers’ creativity using established psychometric tests and related these measures to their performance, gaze behavior, and interaction with the programming environment. Our results show that creativity meaningfully influences how developers approach and execute programming tasks. Participants with higher divergent creativity scores were more exploratory, displaying longer visual engagement and more active IDE interactions. Conversely, participants with higher convergent creativity exhibited more analytical visual scanning and reported greater workload, suggesting a more deliberate and cognitively demanding strategy. Our findings highlight creativity as a meaningful factor in programming behavior and suggest new ways to support diverse thinking styles in software engineering (SE) practice.