Kohler is associated with which of the following?

Theories of learning in educational psychology explain HOW an organism acquires new behaviour or understanding. Behaviourist theories (Pavlov, Thorndike, Skinner) emphasise stimulus-response conditioning through trial and error, while Gestalt (cognitive) theories emphasise sudden insight — a perceptual reorganisation of the problem elements that yields understanding all at once, rather than gradually.

Wolfgang Köhler, a German Gestalt psychologist, studied problem-solving in chimpanzees (notably ‘Sultan’) while at a primate research station on Tenerife. He observed that the animals did not solve problems such as reaching a banana with a stick through blind trial and error, but by suddenly grasping the relationships between the objects in the situation — a phenomenon he termed ‘insight learning’. This work is a foundational contribution to the cognitive/Gestalt strand of the Theory of Learning.

• Theory of motivation deals with WHY behaviour is energised and directed toward a goal (for example, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs or drive-reduction theory) — Köhler’s insight experiments are about HOW a solution is suddenly grasped, not about drives or needs.

• Theory of development deals with age-linked stages of cognitive or social growth (for example, Piaget’s stages or Erikson’s psychosocial stages) — Köhler did not propose any such developmental-stage sequence.

• Theory of personality deals with stable individual traits and dispositions (for example, Freud’s psychoanalytic theory or trait theories) — Köhler’s work on chimpanzee problem-solving does not describe personality structure.

Since Köhler’s insight-learning experiments describe HOW learning/problem-solving occurs, his work is correctly classified under the Theory of Learning.