Cognitive Styles and Accounting Information Navigation: A Preliminary Investigation

Abstract

Interactive information visualization is a new research direction in the area of accounting information systems dealing with the use of technology to interactively visually represent data to enhance an individual’s ability to acquire and use knowledge. One of important topics in this line of research is the information selection and navigation. The present study follows this research direction by attempting to explore the extent to which accounting information is searched and navigated in different patterns of tasks and decision-makers. Following a quasi experiment design, a web application was developed to collect data. Participants were required to perform a task in analyzing ROA data using given financial information of an anonymous fictious firm. The treatment of this study is the navigation strategy. The results of the data analysis have shown that the decision-making performance between two cognitive styles (field-independent and field-dependent) and two navigation strategies (breadth-first and depth-first) was not statistically significantly different. Nevertheless, the time spent in identifying the correct information was found to be significantly different between the two cognitive styles; field-independent and field-dependent. This research is an initial step in investigating the influence of decision-maker characteristics and navigation strategies on the decision-making process. There is still an ample area to further investigate how information technology in information navigation could be benefit in the decision-making process.