Cognitive characteristics and the perceived importance of information

RECENTLY, several accounting studies have made use of concepts and relationships from the field of cognitive psychology. Ijiri, Jaedicke and Knight employed the notion of functional fixation to describe an individual's adaptiveness to a change in accounting process.' Similarly, Livingstone referred to learning sets in explaining why some utilities were slow in adjusting to accounting changes.2 Revsine employed the conceptual abstractness construct to speculate on its possible moderating effects in an experimental situation' and on its significance with respect to information overload.4 Yet, despite this interest in relationships between cognitive factors and information usage, little empirical study has been made of the role that cognitive factors may play in accounting. Of particular interest to accountants is the possibility that the cognitive characteristics of an information user may affect his perception of what information is important and, hence, may affect how information influences his ultimate behavior. There is considerable support in the psychological literature on human information processing for the existence of such relationships. For example, Schroder et al.5 cited three studies of game playing by teams whose members differ in their level of conceptual abstractness. Driver' related the source of the information used in playing a game to the conceptual structures of the team members and found that cognitively simpler subjects relied more heavily on information handed down by an external authority. Similarly, Terhune and Kennedy7 reported that teams whose members were complex showed more reliance on conceptual information than did simple subjects who preferred concrete data. Tuckman8 investigated the amount