ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Cognitive Science
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1618197
How order of numbers in addition affects cognitive effort of processing
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China
- 2Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
- 3Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary
- 4University of Education Weingarten, Weingarten, Germany
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In this study, our aim was to find out how order of numbers in the arithmetic operation of addition affects cognitive effort of mental processing. We presented two sets of addition questions (a + b) to a group of participants. In one set of questions, the first number of each item was larger than the second number (a> 𝑏). In another set of questions, the first number was smaller than the second number (a< 𝑏). The participants were asked to answer each item within a period of 12 seconds.The results showed that when the first number was larger than the second number, participants provided more correct answers and were faster in giving correct answers. Two explanations are discussed for these results. Finally, it is concluded that the property of commutativity of addition does not mean that performing that operation in various situations involves the same level of cognitive effort.
Keywords: addition, Arithmetic operation, Order of numbers, processing, cognitive effort
Received: 25 Apr 2025; Accepted: 21 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Khatin-Zadeh, Farsani, Eskandari, Ghahraman and Banaruee. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Danyal Farsani, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
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