Abstract The purpose of this article is to increase the reader's understanding of the analytical review process and to identify productive topics for future research. The strengths of the article were: the model of the American Review (AR) process from the viewpoint of cognitive psychology; one needs to understand better how auditors develop mental representations, that is, develop expectations and identify unusual differences between expected and actual results and one needs to understand better, how auditors search for information to confirm or disconfirm their hypothesis and how the attributes of information such as its expected cost, availability, reliability and diagnosticity, affect the search. The weaknesses of the article are: the comment that little is known about the process of performing AR; the comment that the goal of AR is not fixed; when one reads about the past research in this area, much of it seems to prove what is intuitively obvious; the comment that indicates that auditors may be reluctant to place greater reliance on AR work seems to concentrate the auditor's judgment thresholds may be near the certainty level-whether AR is used for planning, substantive or overall purposes.
Norman R. Walker (Thu,) studied this question.