A Cognitive Characterization of Audit Analytical Review.
从认知角度将审计分析性复核描述为诊断性、顺序性和迭代性的过程，梳理现有研究并指出未来方向，帮助学者和从业者理解其认知成分。
Abstract Audit analytical review involves identifying and determining the cause of unexpected fluctuations in account balances and other financial relationships. Despite the increased use of analytical review, little is known about the process of performing this task and about its effectiveness and efficiency. The purpose of this article, therefore, is to provide a framework for understanding the analytical review process, to review the extant analytical review research within this framework, and to identify profitable areas for future research. To accomplish these goals, this article takes a cognitive orientation and characterizes analytical review as a diagnostic, sequential, and iterative (DSI) process. Diagnostic reasoning appears to be an important part of analytical review in light of recent descriptive research (Blocher and Cooper 1988), which finds that auditors performing this task typically perform the four distinct components of diagnostic inference: mental representation, hypothesis generation, information search, and hypothesis evaluation. Analytical review also is sequential since the auditor must acquire sufficient information to identify an unexpected fluctuation before generating potential causes for an observed fluctuation and seeking out and evaluating information relevant to those causes. Finally, the task is iterative since the auditor may re-perform components, if necessary. The expected contributions of this article are twofold. First, this article should allow both academics and practitioners to better understand the process of analytical review and also to more fully appreciate its significant cognitive components. Second, by describing the prior research and identifying topics for future research, this article should encourage researchers to consider where their efforts may be most productive. Such focus will necessarily enhance our understanding of analytical review.