People accurately predict the shape but not the parameters of skill learning curves

Decades of research have shown that skill learning often unfolds exponentially — people improve rapidly early on, and then performance gradually levels off. Given how important expectations of learning are for actual learning, we explored whether people accurately intuit this canonical time course of skill learning. Across six preregistered experiments (n = 500), we find that people correctly predict that skill learning curves (error reductions over time) on a novel visuomotor task will follow an exponential decay function, both for an imagined naïve player and for themselves, before engaging with the task. Moreover, people are sensitive to conditions that merit exponential learning within a bounded time frame and only predict these curves when an imagined player puts in effort and the task is not too difficult. However, people systematically misestimate specific parameters of skill learning (e.g., initial and average performance, and rate of improvement), which relates to reduced affect at the beginning of learning. Critically, these negative effects can be ameliorated by practice: Providing people with minimal practice reduces their prediction errors and, in turn, buffers them from negative feelings at the beginning of learning.