Audit research has generally concluded that auditors primarily organize
their memory of financial statement errors by audit objective rather than transaction
cycle. Although this stream of research has typically used the cue sorting method, the
concept of primary organizing dimension is believed to be sufficiently general to obtain
consistent results with other experimental methods e.g., Nelson et al. 1995. The purpose
of this study is to determine if the finding that auditor knowledge of financial
statement errors is organized primarily around audit objectives can be replicated with a
priming/reaction time method. The priming/reaction time method is widely used in
knowledge structure research and appears consistent with the concept of primary organizing
dimension discussed in the audit literature. We conducted a study with sorting
and priming/reaction time phases. Consistent with prior research, the sorting phase
found that audit objective was the primary organizing dimension for both managers and
staff. However, the priming/reaction time phase found that managers’ knowledge was
primarily structured around transaction cycle, while staff demonstrated no primary organizing
structure.