Albert Bandura is associated with which of the following?

Major theories of human development and learning are each closely identified with the psychologist who formulated them. Social learning theory (later extended as social cognitive theory) holds that people learn new behaviours largely by observing and imitating models, mediated by attention, retention, reproduction, and motivation — not solely through direct reinforcement or innate maturational stages.

Albert Bandura formulated social learning theory, most famously demonstrated through his Bobo doll experiments, in which children reproduced aggressive behaviour they had merely observed in an adult model, without receiving any reinforcement themselves. This established observational learning (modelling) as a distinct learning pathway, and it is the theory most closely tied to Bandura's name.

The other three options belong to different theorists and different mechanisms of development:

• Behavioural theory explains learning purely through conditioning — classical conditioning, in which a neutral stimulus is paired with an unconditioned stimulus until it alone triggers a reflex response (Pavlov; also applied by Watson in the Little Albert study), or operant conditioning, in which consequences such as reward and punishment strengthen or weaken behaviour (Skinner) — with no requirement that the learner observe a model at all.

• Cognitive development theory (Jean Piaget) describes children progressing through an invariant sequence of qualitatively different stages of reasoning — sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, formal operational — driven by active processes such as assimilation and accommodation as the child interacts with its environment, a structure of thought unrelated to modelling.

• Psychosexual development (Sigmund Freud) explains personality formation through stages driven by unconscious libidinal energy — oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital — a psychoanalytic account unrelated to observational learning.

Bandura's Bobo-doll studies demonstrated that children could acquire a new behaviour purely by observing a model, without needing any reinforcement, a maturational stage shift, or an unconscious drive to explain it — a finding that uniquely fits social learning theory and rules out the other three options.

Albert Bandura is therefore associated with social learning theory.