The Relationship Between Knowledge Structure and Judgments for Experienced and Inexperienced Auditors.

Abstract The article examine some differences in the knowledge structures and judgments of experienced and inexperienced auditors in the United States. It examines the recall of typical and atypical information by experienced and inexperienced auditors within the context of a going-concern situation and then relates this measure of memory to the inferences and predictive judgments made by these auditors. In experiment 1, auditors read a description of a company that the audit partner-in-charge had suggested may have a going-concern problem. The description consisted of items that are considered typical of a company with going-concern problems, atypical Items, and filter items. After an intervening period with a distracter task, all subjects were given a recall test, were asked to infer the likelihood of certain previously unstated items being true, and to estimate the probability that the firm would fail within a year. In experiment 2 and 3, the researchers collected additional data to examine some validity threats related to the first experiment.