This is not new at all. There have been people studying this (myself only for the last 6 years) for quite some time, generally falling under the field of human-computer interaction. Even in the 70s researchers were studying how people <i>read</i> code.<p>In fact, there are niche conferences like VL/HCC (human-centric computing), ICPC (program comprehension), and PPIG (psychology of programming) that publish papers in this area each year. Bigger conferences, such as CHI, also publish a handful of papers on novel ways to interact with code each year too.