Book excerpt: First published in 1986. The main objective of this book is to provide a hard-headed theoretical integration of several different major areas of research on learning, cognition, and motivation in humans and other mammals. By hard-headed, the author simply means that the concepts were generated from empirical data and are testable. Since an integrative theory must of necessity integrate apparent diversity, such an approach involves the identification and description of the most fundamental factors (structural processes) underlying the observed capacities of humans and animals in the domain of learning and motivation.