Agreeing on a definition of innate talent

Before considering evidence for and against the talent account, we should be as clear as possible about what is meant by "talent". In everyday life people are rarely precise about what they mean by this term: users do not specify what form an innate talent takes or how it might exert its influence.

Certain pitfalls have to be avoided in settling on a definition of talent. A very restrictive definition could make it impossible for any conceivable evidence to demonstrate talent. For example, some people believe that talent is based on an inborn ability that makes it certain that its possessor will excel. This criterion is too strong. At the other extreme, it would be possible to make the definition of talent so vague that its existence is trivially ensured; talent might imply no more than that those who reach high levels of achievement differ biologically from others in some undefined way. Yet those who believe that innate talent exists also assume that early signs of it can be used to predict future success.

For the purposes of this article we will take talent to have five properties: (1) It originates in genetically transmitted structures and hence is at least partly innate. (2) Its full effects may not be evident at an early stage, but there will be some advance indications, allowing trained people to identify the presence of talent before exceptional levels of mature performance have been demonstrated. (3) These early indications of talent provide a basis for predicting who is likely to excel. (4) Only a minority are talented, for if all children were, then there would be no way to predict or explain differential success. Finally (5), talents are relatively domain-specific.

In principle, it is desirable be precise about the indicators of talent, but in practice some imprecision is unavoidable, as in the phrase "relatively domain-specific" in (5). We would have preferred to be able to specify the boundaries between domains, but this is not currently possible. Nor can one specify just how much a trait should facilitate the acquisition of special abilities to qualify as a talent: the available empirical evidence is too coarse. We allow the possibility that an innate talent can take different forms; so saying that each of two children have "a talent for music" need not imply that both are advantaged in precisely the same way. A domain may draw on many different skills, and individuals' competence levels on them may not be highly intercorrelated (Sloboda, 1985; 1991).

1.2 The talent concept in researchers' explanations

Our five properties are meant to provide a working definition that is acceptable to researchers and captures lay intuitions. Like laymen, researchers typically believe that when they introduce the term talent they are predicting or explaining someone's performance, not just describing it. For example, Feldman (1988), writing about child prodigies, remarks that "it is not obvious what their talents will lead to" (p. 281): he insists that "the child must possess talent, and it must be very powerful" (p. 280). For Feldman, talents cannot be acquired; they must be "possessed" innately by prodigies. He believes that they demonstrate "exceptional pretuning to an already existing body of knowledge, one that countless others had spent time and energy developing and refining" (p. 278). Similarly, Gardner (1993a) equates talent with early potential, noting that "a poignant state of affairs results when an individual of high talent and promise ends up failing to achieve that potential" (p. 176). For Gardner, talent is defined as a sign of precocious biopsychological potential in a particular domain (Gardner, 1984; 1993b). The possession of "a strong gift in a specific domain, be it dance, chess or mathematics" is recognised by Gardner when there is a coincidence of factors, the first of which is "native talent" (p. 51). According to him, individuals who accomplish a great deal are people who were "at promise" in relevant areas from early in life.

For Heller (1993 p. 139) "scientific giftedness" "can be defined as scientific thinking potential or as a special talent to excel in [natural sciences]". Detterman (1993 p. 234) likewise suggests that "innate ability is what you are talking about when you are talking about talent." Eysenck claims a strong genetic basis underlies all the variables associated with giftedness (Eysenck & Barrett, 1993): he insists on the existence of genetically transmitted talents, which he regards as necessary but not sufficient for the emergence of genius (Eysenck, 1995). Benbow and Lubinski (1993) agree that talent is explicitly biological: they claim that "people are born into this world with some biological predispositions" (p. 65). Based on a survey of the use of terms like "aptitude," "giftedness" and "talent" by experts and lay persons, Gagné (1993) concludes that a special ability must have a genetic basis for it to be defined as a gift or aptitude. Winner (1996; Winner & Martino, 1993) regards talents as unlearned domain-specific traits which may develop or "come to fruition" in favourable circumstances but cannot be manufactured. Talents are likely to be identified by parents or teachers or they may be discovered fortuitously (Winner & Martino, 1993, p. 259), but many gifted children go unrecognised.

The above quotations make it clear that researchers and experts do make extensive use of the concept of talent to predict exceptional abilities and to explain their causes. Researchers as well as educators rely upon the talent account, making it important to examine its validity.

Some previous challenges to the talent account have concentrated on the field of music. Sloboda, Davidson & Howe (1994a; 1994b) raised objections to the view that musical expertise arises from talent. They noted, for example, that in some non-Western cultures musical achievements are considerably more widespread than in our own (see Section 3.3), that there are often no early signs of unusual excellence in outstanding adult instrumentalists (Sosniak, 1985), and that very early experiences may be the real cause of what is interpreted to be talent (Hepper, 1991; Parncutt, 1993). Others have challenged this analysis, arguing that the evidence of strong cultural influences on musicality can be reconciled with the existence of innate talent (Davies, 1994; see also Radford, 1994; Torff & Winner, 1994; Hargreaves, 1994).

Criticisms of the talent account in other domains have been raised by Ericsson and Charness (1995a; 1995b), who provide substantial evidence that the effects of extended deliberate practice are more decisive than is commonly believed. They argue that although children undoubtedly differ in the ease with which they perform various skills (a fact to which Gardner, 1995, has drawn attention in challenging their conclusions), no early predictors of adult performance have been found.

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 834