Putting practice into perspective: Child prodigies as evidence of innate talent

Abstract

The debate over whether exceptional abilities are primarily the product of nature or nurture began centuries ago — and continues to this day. Recently, much of this debate took place within the context of considering the abilities of exceptional musicians. Several of such studies suggested that general intelligence and domain specific skills, both of which fall on the nature side of the spectrum, play a significant role in the development of musical abilities. In this paper, the author demonstrates that those studies which attempted to argue for a purely nurture-driven account of such musical talent, moreover, merely showed that practice has some role to play in the development of talent; they failed to rule out the possibility that factors such as general intelligence and domain specific skills also contribute to the development of exceptional performance abilities. If the evidence generated by studies of exceptional musicians provides a strong basis for believing that nature is the primary driver of exceptional talent, that evidence receives a powerful boost from recent studies of child prodigies. Child prodigies provide a particularly fascinating view on the nature versus nurture debate because of the extremely young age at which the prodigies demonstrate their remarkable abilities, thus, limiting the extent to which their abilities can be solely the result of extreme dedication to practice. Despite this fact, some have still argued that child prodigies' abilities are nurture-driven. Recent research, however, demonstrates that child prodigies' skills are highly dependent on a few features of their cognitive profiles, including elevated general IQs, exceptional working memories, and elevated attention to detail. Other innate characteristics of the child prodigies predict the domain in which the prodigies will excel. Music prodigies, for example, tend to score better with respect to their general IQs, visual spatial abilities, and working memories, than art prodigies. This new research on a group of exceptional – and exceptionally young – performers strongly supports nature as the primary driver of extreme talent.