Learning the value of difficult problems requires active learning

Learning often requires effort. One common method to motivate learners is to offer reward which may be scaled by the difficulty of the learning problem. How does associating difficulty and reward impact the learning process? Participants (N = 125) recruited globally on Prolific actively or observationally learned categories with exemplars of varying difficulty and received reward that was positively, negatively, or unrelated to difficulty. Surprisingly, associating reward value with difficulty did not impact learning. Learners had biased expectations about the value of difficulty – more difficult exemplars should yield higher rewards. When rewards were random or learning was observational, the bias persisted. This bias was only overcome when rewards violated this expectation and learners actively exerted effort to receive reward. These results suggest that even when learners can use reward information to guide learning, they have clear expectations about how learning efforts should be rewarded.