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We can talk of the functional or causal chain involved in discrimination behavior by three links: organism's exposure to stimuli, inner mediated condition, and response. Direct information of the second link is, however, usually not available. While cognitivists tend unintentionally to create a homunculus in the organism, behaviorists prefer to fill the second link with hypothetical constructs or simply to keep it in a black box and seek a functional relationship between the first and third links. The author of this book tries to pry open the box and make the invisibles visible and manipulable.
In this endeavor, the author uses the first 13 chapters for the critical review of the experimental and theoretical works relating to the discrimination processes and identifies the sequence of operations which is assumed to be essential in discrimination behavior. Description of the author's cybernetic model of the discrimination process