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.This Figshare item provides the supplementary materials for our CHASE submission, including the processed datasets and derived metrics used in the analyses reported in the paper. The repository is organized by data source and measurement type to support transparency and reproducibility.What is includedCodeGRITS (IDE interaction metrics)agg_metrics_codeGrits_task1agg_metrics_codeGrits_task2Aggregated metrics extracted from CodeGRITS capturing participants’ interactions with the IDE for Task 1 and Task 2.Creativity scores and workloadcreativity-score-groupsNASA_TLX_ScoresCreativity test results (TTCT, RAT, DAT), group classifications, and NASA-TLX questionnaire scores measuring subjective workload.Eye tracking metrics (Tobii Pro Lab exports)task1-finaltask2-finalEye movement metrics extracted from Tobii Pro Lab for Task 1 and Task 2.Programming strategy metricscolumn_guidestask-metricsDerived measures related to participants’ problem-solving strategies, plus a column guide describing each metric and field.Post-questionnaire responsespost-questionnaireThe full set of post-questionnaire questions and participant responses.Related publicationThis dataset accompanies: [Creative Minds at the Keyboard: Eye-Tracking Insights into How Developers Think and Code] (CHASE, 2026).