When 6-year-old Kyla imitates her mother, carefully wrapping and setting out presents for the holiday celebration, she is praised and given holiday cookies. Kyla's learning of gender-linked behaviors is best explained by theory.

Social learning        

Explanation:

In psychology, social learning theory is a theory that was first proposed by Albert Bandura according to which we learn by observing and imitating other people. Also it focuses on the role of models and how our behavior is influenced by these "models" which give us patterns of behavior in specific situation.

This theory places a lot of importance on the social environment of the child in order for him/her to learn new behaviors.

In this example, Kyla imitates her mother wrapping presents and then she is praised and given holiday cookies. We can see that Kyla is imitating a model (her mom) and the behavior her mom is doing, then, the social environment rewards her with cookies for this behavior. Thus, we can say that Kyla's learning of gender-linked behaviors is best explained by the social learning theory.