Xiuyuan Flora Zhang

Beliefs about Skill Acquisition

Acquiring new skills often takes time and practice. Whether learning to ride a bike, play chess, or code a computer program, people face frequent decisions about when and how much effort to invest in learning skills, and how long to continue those efforts. However, learners do not always know when they are making progress. This presents a challenge for motivation over time, both for those acquiring skills and those teaching them. I am passionate about using insights from behavioral and cognitive science to make learning more effective and enjoyable. In one of my main lines of work, I investigate how people represent the basic process of learning, and how their beliefs about their own learning affect their actual learning experiences.

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

with Sam McDougle and Julia Leonard in Cognition (2025)

[link to paper] [OSF repository]

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.

Children predict improvement on novel skill learning tasks

with Brandon Carrillo, AC Christakis, and Julia Leonard at Child Development (2025)

[link to paper] [OSF repository]

Learning takes time: Performance usually starts poorly and improves with practice. Do children intuit this basic phenomenon of skill learning? In preregistered Experiment 1 (N = 125; 54% female; 48% White; collected 2022–2023), US 7- to 8-year-old children predicted improved performance, 5- to 6-year-old children predicted flat performance, and 4-year-old children predicted nearinstant success followed by worse performance on a novel skill learning task. In preregistered Experiment 2 (N = 75; 47% female; 69% White; collected 2023), on a task with lowered cognitive demands, US 4- to 6-year-old children predicted improved performance. Thus, although children expect to improve on novel tasks, younger children need scaffolding to form these predictions and grasp this fundamental aspect of learning.

Beliefs about Ownership

From coffee mugs to song lyrics, we take ownership over many kinds tangible and intangible objects. We can also readily judge if an object is owned by others. Ownership serves as a great test case for studying social cognition, especially since the maintenance and transfer of ownership requires coordination and mutual recognition of owners' rights. My research examines how people integrate different social and perceptual cues to make ownership judgments, and pinpoints where disagreements might arise. I am further interested in people's ownership judgments beyond physical property and how the sense of ownership could license people to interact with objects and their owners differently.

People have systematically different ownership intuitions in seemingly simple cases

with Paul Bloom and Julian Jara-Ettinger in Psychological Science (2024)

[link to paper] [OSF repository]

Our understanding of ownership influences how we interact with objects and with each other. Here, we studied people’s intuitions about ownership transfer using a set of simple, parametrically varied events. We found that people (N = 120 U.S. adults) had similar intuitions about ownership for some events but sharply opposing intuitions for others (Experiment 1). People (N = 120 U.S. adults) were unaware of these conflicts and overestimated ownership consensus (Experiment 2). Moreover, differences in people’s ownership intuitions predicted their intuitions about the acceptability of using, altering, controlling, and destroying the owned object (N = 130 U.S. adults; Experiment 3), even when ownership was not explicitly mentioned (N = 130 U.S. adults; Experiment 4). Subject-level analyses suggest that these disagreements reflect at least two underlying intuitive theories, one in which intentions are central to ownership and another in which physical possession is prioritized.