My proposed research agenda directly advances the program comprehension subfield of software engineering by conducting realistic empirical studies using biometric equipment within developer work environments and understanding how novices differ from experts in a varied of different programming paradigms and tasks. The impact of this work can be seen by educators, practitioners, and researchers. I propose a family of studies specifically designed to test program comprehension in different settings and in different expertise levels, which are all accompanied by different cognitive tasks that will be correlated with the performance of software tasks, to explore whether theories of cognitive science apply to software engineering and programming comprehension. I plan on producing a publicly available de-identified dataset for each of the conducted studies to contribute to open science and artifact archival.