Investigating Financial Statements Recognition Process by Non-professional Users using eye tracking data analysis

Studying the decision-making process of non-professional users of financial information, due to their weakness in understanding and interpreting information, has always been interesting to law-making bodies, standard-setters and researchers in the Accounting field. They try to find solutions to improve financial reporting in order to protect the interests of this vulnerable group by decoding the black box of non-professional users decision-making behavior. In this regard, the current research aims to understand the recognition patterns (metacognition) of non-professional users while reading financial Statements, using eye tracking tool that enables researcher to look at documents through non-professional users eyes and documents and analyzes the observations.Therefore, 14 participants (their education is not related to finance) were asked to answer some questions about three basic financial statements (income statement, statement of financial position, and statement of cash flows) and their gaze data recorded along with it, then by using eye tracking data visualization techniques, the collected data was analyzed. the results indicated that Non-professional users face more cognitive load when reading the statement of financial position. Non-professional users do not have the ability to study the Financial Statements purposefully and they study them based on the sequence of information presentation. This group spends a lot of time understanding the description column of financial statements, which may be more than the time spent reviewing the relevant figures. they also rely on current year's information more than comparative figures, but also comparative figures is important to them. This finding can be useful from the point of view of standard-setting bodies in order to improve financial reporting and protect the interests of non-professional users of accounting information.