Testing the Deliberate Practice Theory: Does Practice Reduce the Heritability of Musical Expertise?

The deliberate practice (DP) theory claims that expertise essentially reflects the accumulated amount of deliberate practice, and that with sufficient practice, genetic influences on expertise will be bypassed. Thus, a core prediction of the DP theory is that genetic effects on performance decrease as a function of practice. Here, we test this prediction using music as a model domain.

Accelerating Visual Anticipation in Sport Through Temporal Occlusion Training: A Meta-Analysis.

Background: The video-based temporal occlusion paradigm has been consistently used in visual anticipation sport research.

Objective: This meta-analysis investigated the magnitude to which video-based temporal occlusion training could improve anticipation skill with transfer to representative laboratory and field tasks.

Methods: As there are considerably fewer anticipation training than performance studies, the meta-analysis included 12 intervention studies with 25 effect sizes where video simulation and/or field-based tests were used.

Explaining the Validity of the ASVAB for Job-Relevant Multitasking Performance: The Role of Placekeeping Ability.

Scores on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) predict military job (and training) performance better than any single variable so far identified. However, it remains unclear what factors explain this predictive relationship. Here, we investigated the contributions of (Gf) and two executive functions- and -to the relationship between the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) score from the ASVAB and job-relevant multitasking performance.

The validity of general cognitive ability predicting job-specific performance is stable across different levels of job experience.

Decades of research in industrial-organizational psychology have established that measures of general cognitive ability () consistently and positively predict job-specific performance to a statistically and practically significant degree across jobs. But is the validity of stable across different levels of job experience? The present study addresses this question using historical large-scale data across 31 diverse military occupations from the Joint-Service Job Performance Measurement/Enlistment Standards Project ( = 10,088). Across all jobs, results of our meta-analysis find near-zero interactions between Armed Forces Qualification Test score (a composite of math and verbal scores) and time in service when predicting job-specific performance.

Participation patterns in talent development in youth sports.

There has been a longstanding debate about the question: What amounts of what types of youth sport activities optimally facilitate later athletic excellence? This article provides a review of relevant research. We first evaluate popular conceptualizations of participation patterns-early specialization, deliberate practice, and deliberate play. Then, we review the available evidence on associations between performance and individual participation variables.

Quantifying the Extent to Which Successful Juniors and Successful Seniors are Two Disparate Populations: A Systematic Review and Synthesis of Findings.

Background: To what extent does the pathway to senior elite success build on junior elite success? Evidence from longitudinal studies investigating athletes' junior-to-senior performance development is mixed; prospective studies have reported percentages of juniors who achieved an equivalent competition level at senior age (e.g., international championships at both times) ranging from 0 to 68%.

Exploring individual differences in musical rhythm and grammar skills in school-aged children with typically developing language.

A growing number of studies have shown a connection between rhythmic processing and language skill. It has been proposed that domain-general rhythm abilities might help children to tap into the rhythm of speech (prosody), cueing them to prosodic markers of grammatical (syntactic) information during language acquisition, thus underlying the observed correlations between rhythm and language. Working memory processes common to task demands for musical rhythm discrimination and spoken language paradigms are another possible source of individual variance observed in musical rhythm and language abilities.

Ability and Nonability Predictors of Real-World Skill Acquisition: The Case of Rubik's Cube Solving.

Most research on skilled performance is correlational, with skill and predictors measured at a single point in time, making it difficult to draw conclusions about the acquisition of skill. By contrast, in this study, we trained novice participants ( = 79) to solve Rubik's Cubes using a 7-step solution method. Participants also completed measures of fluid intelligence (Gf), working memory capacity (WMC), and nonability factors (grit, growth mindset, NFC, and the "big five").

The ACT Predicts Academic Performance-But Why?

Scores on the ACT college entrance exam predict college grades to a statistically and practically significant degree, but what explains this predictive validity? The most obvious possibility is general intelligence-or psychometric "". However, inconsistent with this hypothesis, even when independent measures of are statistically controlled, ACT scores still positively predict college grades. Here, in a study of 182 students enrolled in two Introductory Psychology courses, we tested whether pre-course knowledge, motivation, interest, and/or personality characteristics such as grit and self-control could explain the relationship between ACT and course performance after controlling for .

Task independence of placekeeping as a cognitive control construct: Evidence from individual differences and experimental effects.

Many cognitive tasks have what we refer to as a placekeeping requirement: steps or subtasks must be performed in a linear or other systematic fashion, without repetitions or omissions that would compromise performance. Here we asked whether the cognitive control mechanisms that meet this requirement are specific to individual tasks or general enough to be shared across tasks. Participants (N = 289) performed two tasks (Letterwheel and UNRAVEL) that share a sequential structure but are otherwise distinct.

Attributes of Expert Anticipation Should Inform the Design of Virtual Reality Simulators to Accelerate Learning and Transfer of Skill.

Expert sport performers cope with a multitude of visual information to achieve precise skill goals under time stress and pressure. For example, a major league baseball or cricket batter must read opponent variations in actions and ball flight paths to strike the ball in less than a second. Crowded playing schedules and training load restrictions to minimise injury have limited opportunity for field-based practice in sports.

Revisiting the self-generation effect in proofreading.

The self-generation effect refers to the finding that people's memory for information tends to be better when they generate it themselves. Counterintuitively, when proofreading, this effect may make it more difficult to detect mistakes in one's own writing than in others' writing. We investigated the self-generation effect and sources of individual differences in proofreading performance in two eye-tracking experiments.

Predictors of Junior Versus Senior Elite Performance are Opposite: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Participation Patterns.

Background: Does early specialization facilitate later athletic excellence, or is early diversification better? This is a longstanding theoretical controversy in sports science and medicine. Evidence from studies investigating athletes' starting age, childhood/adolescent progress, and amounts of coach-led practice and peer-led play in their main sport and in other sports has been mixed. Each participation variable was positively correlated with performance in some studies but uncorrelated or negatively correlated with performance in others.

Is the Deliberate Practice View Defensible? A Review of Evidence and Discussion of Issues.

The question of what explains individual differences in expertise within complex domains such as music, games, sports, science, and medicine is currently a major topic of interest in a diverse range of fields, including psychology, education, and sports science, to name just a few. Ericsson and colleagues' is a highly influential perspective in the literature on expertise and expert performance-but is it viable as a testable scientific theory? Here, reviewing more than 25 years of Ericsson and colleagues' writings, we document critical inconsistencies in the definition of deliberate practice, along with apparent shifts in the standard for evidence concerning deliberate practice. We also consider the impact of these issues on progress in the field of expertise, focusing on the empirical testability and falsifiability of the deliberate practice view.

Innovative problem-solving in wild hyenas is reliable across time and contexts.

Individual differences in behavior are the raw material upon which natural selection acts, but despite increasing recognition of the value of considering individual differences in the behavior of wild animals to test evolutionary hypotheses, this approach has only recently become popular for testing cognitive abilities. In order for the intraspecific approach with wild animals to be useful for testing evolutionary hypotheses about cognition, researchers must provide evidence that measures of cognitive ability obtained from wild subjects reflect stable, general traits. Here, we used a multi-access box paradigm to investigate the intra-individual reliability of innovative problem-solving ability across time and contexts in wild spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta).

Incremental validity of placekeeping as a predictor of multitasking.

Multitasking is ubiquitous in everyday life, which means there is value in developing measures that predict successful multitasking performance. In a large sample (N = 404 contributing data), we examined the predictive and incremental validity of placekeeping, which is the ability to perform a sequence of operations in a certain order without omissions or repetitions. In the context of multitasking, placekeeping should play a role in the performance of procedural subtasks and the interleaving of subtasks that interrupt each other.

Toward a cumulative science of expertise: commentary on Moxley, Ericsson, and Tuffiash (2017).

In a recent Psychological Research article, Moxley, Ericsson, and Tuffiash (2017) report two studies of SCRABBLE expertise. The results revealed that the average SCRABBLE rating was higher for males than for females. Moreover, correlational and structural equation analyses revealed that activities that the authors refer to as "purposeful practice" accounted for a substantial amount of the variance in SCRABBLE ratings.

How Firm Are the Foundations of Mind-Set Theory? The Claims Appear Stronger Than the Evidence.

refers to people's beliefs about whether attributes are malleable () or unchangeable ( ). Proponents of mind-set theory have made bold claims about mind-set's importance. For example, one's mind-set is described as having profound effects on one's motivation and achievements, creating different psychological worlds for people, and forming the core of people's meaning systems.

Individual differences point to two separate processes involved in the resolution of binocular rivalry.

Although binocular rivalry is different from other perceptually bistable phenomena in requiring interocular conflict, it also shares numerous features with those phenomena. This raises the question of whether, and to what extent, the neural bases of binocular rivalry and other bistable phenomena overlap. Here we examine this question using an individual-differences approach.

Is working memory capacity a causal factor in fluid intelligence?

It is well established that measures of reasoning ability and of working memory capacity (WMC) correlate positively. However, the question of what explains this relationship remains open. The purpose of this study was to investigate the capacity hypothesis, which ascribes causality to WMC.