CATEGORY WIDTH COGNITIVE STYLE AS A FACTOR IN ACCOUNTANTS' PERCEPTIONS OF ACCOUNTING INFORMATION
This paper reports the findings of a laboratory experiment designed to investigate the relationship of category width (CW) cognitive style with accountants' perceptions of accounting information. Subjects drawn from large accounting firms in Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne, Australia, were classified into broad, medium, and narrow categories following the test devised by Pettigrew [19]. Subjects were requested to state their level of confidence in decisions they had made after receiving (1) conventional accounting information or (2) conventional accounting information and human resources accounting (HRA) information using a one-group pretest-posttest design. The results indicated a significant relationship between CW cognitive style and the accountants' confidence in their decisions. Furthermore, CW cognitive style moderated the accounting-information/decision-making relationship.
Cognition in Organizational Analysis: Who's Minding the Store?
Research on cognition in organizations has focused primarily on managers and how they think while performing a variety of managerial tasks. This approach limits our understanding of cognition at the collective level and the interactive effects across levels of analysis. We propose a framework of cognition — based on structure, process, and style — which can be applied to the individual, group and organizational levels of analysis. By mapping the territory, we observe certain well-travelled routes, while other terrain remains relatively unexplored. This map also identifies theoretical and methodological road blocks which suggest a number of future research directions.
The common factors in fifty-two mental tests
An analysis by Thurstone's centroid method of the intercorrelations of fifty-two tests was carried to ten factors. Included were tests of social intelligence, Philip's attention tests, and Seashore's tests of musical ability. After rotation of axes, the most important factors appeared to pertain to operations conventionally alluded to by the following terms: verbal facility; spatial ability; numerical ability; attention; musical ability; and memory (or memory span). The social intelligence tests proved to be mainly tests of the verbal factor. A factorial sex difference was indicated by the superiority of men in tests of spatial ability.