Cognitive Characteristics and the Perceived Importance of Information.

This article presents information on cognitive factors 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. This paper describes a field study in which the applicability of some of these findings to the administrative information system domain was investigated. The objective of the study was to determine if the cognitive characteristics of a manager affect his perceptions of what information is important to performing his job role. The cognitive characteristic selected for investigation in this study was the level of an individual's intolerance of ambiguity. Its selection was motivated by the fact that it is conceptually related to both dogmatism and integrative complexity, which were the cognitive variables employed in the psychological studies of information processing cited above, and also is a variable of potential significance to accountants in its own right.