She could always tell the difference between 60 and 120/144, the way she saw the difference between 120 and 144 was comparing the pointer trail. She didn't notice that animations were smoother though, so that's definitely trained.
I hate myself so I run Linux on all my client machines, and if my display goes to 60 I notice by the first animation on my desktop (which is essentially only the start menu).
If you're curious it's easy to set different refresh rates on your monitors and try it out for yourself, the 60hz thing is bogus.
I also notice an awful lot of lag when movies have panoramic shots, they are less than 30hz. There are workarounds with computed frames in most modern tvs that help with this.
The difference between gaming at 4K and 1440p or even 1080p however is not that significant imo. Competitive (and many casual) gamers prefer a high frame rate to high resolution.
But as display technology improves people will just come to expect their games should run in native 4k resolution.