Lack of early signs

As noted in Section 2.1, much of the evidence pointing to very early indications of unusual abilities is either retrospective or based upon records supplied by parents whose claims to have played no active role in stimulating their child's progress are belied by other information. Except in the case of a small number of autistic children mentioned in Section 2.4, there is no firm evidence of exceptional early progress without above- average degrees of parental support and encouragement. This is not to say that parental support or special opportunities and training account for all instances of excellence.

Innate influences might operate in ways that do not produce early signs, but to predict progress early evidence of talent is necessary. Unidentifiable early influences cannot be regarded as instances of talent, for the reasons given in Section 1.1.

We will first consider some studies of whether children identified as unusually able by midchildhood or later had displayed any early signs of special qualities other than those induced by early parental training or special encouragement.

It is important to keep in mind that early ability is not evidence of talent unless it emerges in the absence of special opportunities to learn. For example, it was once thought that the ability of infants in certain parts of Africa to sit and walk appreciably earlier than European children must have a genetic basis, but Super (1976) showed that this inference was wrong. Studying infants in a Kenyan tribe, he confirmed that they did indeed display motor capacities such as walking, standing and sitting without support a month or so earlier than children in other continents, but he also discovered that the only skills these infants acquired earlier than others were those that their mothers deliberately taught them. When genetically similar infants from the same tribe were brought up in an urban environment in which parents did not provide the special training given in traditional villages, the infants displayed no motor precocity. Super reported a correlation of -.9 between the age at which a baby began to crawl and a measure of the extent to which parents encouraged crawling. These findings do not rule out the possibility that some early differences have biological bases (Rosser & Randolph, 1989), but they do show that this cannot be automatically assumed.

Retrospective interview studies of the early progress of individuals who eventually excel have provided little evidence of early signs of promise. Sosniak (1985; 1990) interviewed at length 21 outstanding American pianists in their mid-thirties, on the brink of careers as concert pianists. She also talked to their parents. There were few indications of the musicians displaying signs of future excellence while they were still very young. In most cases, unusually fast progress followed rather than preceded a combination of good opportunities and vigorous encouragement. Even by the time the young pianists had received around six years of relatively intensive training, it would have been possible to make confident predictions about their eventual success in only a minority of the cases. Similarly, a biographical study of 165 professional musicians in Poland produced very few reports of any preschool behaviour predictive of unusual musicality (Manturzewska, 1986). A longitudinal study of elite German tennis players likewise found no early capacities that predicted tennis performance in early adulthood (Schneider, 1993; see also Monsaas, 1985). Interview studies of the childhood progress of accomplished artists (Sloane & Sosniak, 1985), swimmers (Kalinowski, 1985) and mathematicians (Gustin, 1985) reported very few early signs of exceptional promise prior to deliberate parental encouragement being given.

Howe, Davidson, Moore & Sloboda (1995) studied the form and frequency of early signs of musical ability in 257 children, only some of whom made superior progress as performing musicians. The investigators asked the parents to indicate whether or not specific indicators of musical promise had occurred, and if so, when. The parents were asked when their child first sang, moved to music, showed a liking for music, were attentive to music, or sought involvement in a musical activity. Only with the first of these behaviours, early singing, did those who were eventually most successful display (slightly) earlier onset than the other children. In most of these cases a parent regularly sang to the infant well before any singing by the infant was observed. (See also Howe & Sloboda, 1991a; 1991b; 1991c; Sloboda & Howe, 1991.)

Some authors have suggested that interest and delight in musical sounds may be the marks of innate musical potential (Miller, 1989; Winner & Martino, 1993), but a questionnaire found that they failed as predictors of later musical competence (Howe, Davidson, Moore & Sloboda, 1995). In any case, the assumption that even very early preferences must be innate rather than learned is questionable. Small differences in the amount of attention infants give (for any of a number of reasons) to different kinds of stimuli may elicit increasingly different actions and responses, which eventually produce marked preferences and contribute to differences between young children in their patterns of abilities (Renninger and Wosniak, 1985).

3.2 Evidence pointing to an absence of differences in ease of learning between "talented" individuals and others

Differences in rate or ease of acquisition could reflect a specific talent, but only if other influences are ruled out. This is not easy to do. Confounding variables such as the degree of familiarity of task items may influence performance even in simple memory tasks based on highly familiar numbers (Chi & Ceci, 1987; Miller & Gelman, 1983).

Investigations of long-term practice effects provide some relevant evidence. Sloboda, Davidson, Howe & Moore (1996; see also Sloboda, 1996) found no significant differences between highly successful young musicians and other children in the amount of practice time they required in order to make a given amount of progress between succesive grades in the British musical board examinations. Group differences in average progress were no greater than would have been expected from the differences in the amount of time spent practising. Consistent with these results, Hayes (1981; Simonton, 1991: see also Ericsson & Lehmann, 1996; Howe, 1996a; 1996b; in press) found that that all major composers had needed long periods of training. Hayes (1981) concludes that at least ten years of preparation are necessary. Simonton (1991) considers this an underestimate of the amount of time required. He estimates that, on average, prominent composers produced the first of their compositions to gain a secure place in the classical repertoire between 26 and 31, having begun music lessons around the age of 9 and started composing at around 17. Chess players likewise need at least ten years of sustained preparation to reach international levels of competitiveness (Simon & Chase, 1973); and those who begin in early childhood take even longer (Krogius, 1976). Comparable periods of preparation and training are essential in various other areas, including mathematics (Gustin, 1985), X-ray and medical diagnosis (Patel & Groen, 1991), and sports (Monsaas, 1985; Kalinowski, 1985; see also Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer, 1993).

3.3 Exceptional levels of performance in "untalented" people

A body of findings hard to reconcile with the talent account comes from experiments on ordinary adults who are given large amounts of training at skills that make heavy demands on memory (Chase & Ericsson, 1981; Ceci, Baker & Bronfenbrenner, 1988) or perception (Ericsson & Faivre, 1988). In some instances, the trained subjects achieved performance levels far higher than what most people (including experts in the psychology of learning and memory) had believed possible. Uninformed observers assumed that the participants must have had a special innate aptitude. There have been similar findings in studies of job-related skills in waiters (Ericsson & Polson, 1988) and bar staff (Bennett, 1983). The cocktail waitresses in Bennett's study could regularly remember as many as twenty drink orders at a time: their performance was considerably better than that of a control group made up of university students. It is conceivable that people who are employed as waiters and bar staff gravitate to such jobs because of an inborn memory skill, but the Chase & Ericsson findings make it far more likely that employees excel in recalling orders because of on-the-job practice.

Accomplishments that are rare in one culture but relatively commonplace in another culture also implicate learning rather than gifts. In certain cultures very high levels of skill (by Western standards) have been observed in children's swimming and canoeing (Mead, 1975), land navigation over apparently featureless terrains (Lewis, 1976) and maritime navigation across open water. Certain musical accomplishments are also considerably more widespread in some non-Western cultures than in our own (Blacking, 1973; Feld, 1984; Marshall, 1982; Merriam, 1967; Messenger, 1958; Sloboda, Davidson & Howe, 1994a; 1994b), and Australian desert aboriginal children perform better than white subjects on certain visual memory tasks (Kearins, 1981). The fact that such precocious development of some skills in infants disappears when parents do not apply traditional training customs (Super, 1976, see Section 3.1) suggests that cultural variability in performance is caused by differences in opportunities to learn.

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 865