The fact that it is often best to end a practice session at the peak of your performance seems related to the concept of preventing overfitting by stopping training just before test set performance declines. Your brain needs time to generalize skills (often in the form of gaining insights and often when sleeping) and practicing over and over en masse doesn’t give it time to do this. See e.g. cramming for an exam. I think the main difference here is that with humans you’re talking about diminishing returns on ability in the long-term rather than outright worse performance (Maybe outright worse performance is a common situation for transfer ability?). Epistemic status: shaky
The fact that it is often best to end a practice session at the peak of your performance seems related to the concept of preventing overfitting by stopping training just before test set performance declines. Your brain needs time to generalize skills (often in the form of gaining insights and often when sleeping) and practicing over and over en masse doesn’t give it time to do this. See e.g. cramming for an exam. I think the main difference here is that with humans you’re talking about diminishing returns on ability in the long-term rather than outright worse performance (Maybe outright worse performance is a common situation for transfer ability?). Epistemic status: shaky