A Cognitive model for complexity metrics

Abstract. Cognition involves both short-term and long-term memories. Understanding how they are used can lead to software metrics that predict human performance in software development, and can be used to assess and improve the understandability of both text and code. Short-term memory is most affected by overloading over a short period of time. Long term memory is affected by the frequency and diversity of exposure to a concept and degradation over time. Metrics can be defined based on current understanding of both short-term and long-term memory performance to predict where and how often errors may occur.