Discussion of Patterns, Prototypes and Predictions: An Exploratory Study.

This article presents the author's comments on the article "Discussion of Patterns, Prototypes and Predictions: An Exploratory Study," by I.R.A. Eggleton, published in the present issue of the "Journal of Accounting Research." The author says that the article written by Eggleton is an extremely lengthy document which presents exploratory experimental results into human information processing. As an example of ambitious, well-designed, and well-communicated psychological research, the article is to be commended. The author discusses some of the general strengths and limitations of the research. The most bothersome limitations include the lack of any significant attempt to relate the article to the accounting literature. Eggleton's article reports on two parts of a three-part experiment which emphasized subject's ability rapidly and intuitively to predict future outcomes from a physical process on the basis of past numerical time-series data from that process. In the experiments, rapidly meant that subjects were exposed to a time series of cost data for fifteen seconds and were given forty-five seconds to record their written responses.