Abstract: There is a substantial body of research focused on individual-level factors that predict differences in the ability to learn. Such factors include personality traits (e.g., openness to experience, motivation, growth mindset), base cognitive capacities (e.g., fluid intelligence, working memory), and life experiences (e.g., patterns of video game play or participation in certain sports). There is considerably less research though on individual differences in the ability to generalize learning to new contexts – particularly when co-varying out the original base abilities to learn. Here I’ll present research from a number of different learning domains – perceptual, categorization, motor – where we have observed different patterns of factors predicting base learning abilities (which largely mirror those seen in previous work) – versus the ability to then generalize that learning to new situations (e.g., task-switching ability having essentially zero relationship with base learning, but being one of the strongest predictors of the capacity to generalize learning to new situations). I’ll discuss this in the context of possible interventions, as this work suggests either additional (or perhaps alternative) targets for interventions if the goal is to improve real-life learning outcomes.