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Mathematical model bridges disparate timescales of lifelong learning

Lifelong learning occurs on timescales ranging from minutes to decades. People can lose themselves in a new skill, practicing for hours until exhausted. And they can pursue mastery over days or decades, perhaps abandoning old skills entirely to seek out new challenges. A full understanding of learning requires an account that integrates these timescales. Here, we present a minimal quantitative model that unifies the nested timescales of learning. Our dynamical model recovers classic accounts of skill acquisition, and describes how learning emerges from moment-to-moment dynamics of motivation, fatigue, and work, while also situated within longer-term dynamics of skill selection, mastery, and abandonment. We apply this model to explore the benefits and pitfalls of a variety of training regimes and to characterize individual differences in motivation and skill development. Our model connects previously disparate timescales -- and the subdisciplines that typically study each timescale in isolation -- to offer a unified account of the timecourse of skill acquisition.