Now I'm intrigued...to which "things" are you referring?
I was mostly referring to behavior an expectations.
Many players seem to have issues with 'ganking' because they are confounded by, and thus unprepared for, such behavior; there were no analogs to it for them in the real world. This was not the case for me.
Likewise, some players take in-game events overly personally, perhaps because they aren't used to maintaining a separation between the player and the character, which is something others learn through imaginative exercises like storytelling or role-playing (either in an informal or formal context).
Some people also appear to have trouble with dynamic goals and an apparent over abundance of options. Maybe they are used to doing what's expected of them, I don't know, but something causes these players to have difficulties developing motivations that aren't explicitly rewarded in game and fail to recognize the existence or validity of such motives in others.
Beyond the psychological stuff, I was referring to things like basic spatial awareness, risk/reward assessment, ability to understand the practical implications of theory and statistics, etc...all things I had to have basic competence with in my real-life and in non-video game gaming. When translated over to ED, I feel some of these experiences and outlooks dramatically reduce the learning curve in some areas.
That's something that always gets me about those threads where someone buys a secondary account or clears their save and bemoans that it took them much less time to get back in an anaconda than it did the first time - sure, payouts might have increased a bit over time, but while you can reset your progress as much as you like, you can't reset the skills and experience you've accumulated.
If I was back in the freewinder again running data missions so I could think about upgrading to an adder, you wouldn't see me doing things like getting stuck overheating next to a white dwarf because I didn't know how big the exclusion zone was.
While it's certainly true that one's experience cannot be reset, and these experiences are certainly influenced by a clearer sense of direction and reduced rate of mistakes than they would be, I still think these accounts still have some merit. The game's payouts have increased drastically and even new players can reach most tangible in-game goal posts much faster than was possible early in the game's history.
I'm going to guess for you that it's manipulating abstract geometrical models in your head. i.e. math
An intuitive or previously learned knack for this does help with various gameplay elements, but is only a small part of the fundamentals I was referring to.
