More on deliberate practice, IQ, and WM: Hambrick et al 2013
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Gwern Branwen
May 21, 2013, 9:19:47 PM5/21/13
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"Deliberate practice: Is that all it takes to become an expert?",
Hambrick et al 2013 http://www.msu.edu/~ema/HambrickEtAl13.pdf
> Twenty years ago, Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer (1993) proposed that expert performance reflects a long period of "deliberate practice" rather than innate ability, or “talent”. Ericsson et al. found that elite musicians had accumulated thousands of hours more deliberate practice than less accomplished musicians, and concluded that their theoretical framework could provide “a sufficient account of the major facts about the nature and scarcity of exceptional performance” (p. 392). The deliberate practice view has since gained popularity as a theoretical account of expert performance, but here we show that deliberate practice is not sufficient to explain individual differences in performance in the two most widely studied domains in expertise research — chess and music. For researchers interested in advancing the science of expert performance, the task now is to develop and rigorously test theories that take into account as many potentially relevant explanatory constructs as possible.
>
> ...Applying their framework to several domains, Ericsson et al. (1993) concluded that “high levels of deliberate practice are necessary to attain expert level performance” (p. 392) — and in the next sentence added the following:
>
> > "Our theoretical framework can *also provide a sufficient account* of the major facts about the nature and scarcity of exceptional performance. Our account does not depend on scarcity of innate ability (talent).... We attribute the dramatic differences in performance between experts and amateurs–novices to similarly large differences in the recorded amounts of deliberate practice" (p. 392, emphasis added).
>
> Ericsson et al. (1993) similarly explained that “individual differences in ultimate performance can largely be accounted for by differential amounts of past and current levels of practice” (p.392) and that “the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain” (p. 400).
> Ericsson et al. (1993) allowed that genes may contribute to individual differences in people's willingness to engage in deliberate practice over a long period of time, and thus may indirectly contribute to individual differences in performance, but as the preceding quotations make clear, they explicitly rejected the view that innate *ability* can account for why some people become experts and others fail to do so.
> Ericsson, Nandagopal, and Roring (2005) recently reiterated this perspective when they wrote that
>
> > "...individual differences in genetically determined capacities and fixed structures required for the development of elite performance appear to be quite limited, perhaps even restricted, to a small number of physical characteristics, such as height and body size. The expert-performance framework attempts to explain the large individual differences in performance in terms of individual differences in sustained deliberate practice" (p. 305).
>
> Similarly, Ericsson (2007) argued that “it is possible to account for the development of elite performance among healthy children without recourse to unique talent (genetic endowment) — excepting the innate determinants of body size” (p. 4) and that “distinctive characteristics of elite performers are adaptations to extended and intense practice activities that selectively activate dormant genes that all healthy children's DNA contain” (p. 4). Ericsson, Prietula, and Cokely (2007) wrote more simply that “The *only* innate differences that turn out to be significant – and they matter primarily in sports – are height and body size” (p. 116, emphasis added).
>
> ...Ericsson and colleagues' research is discussed in a number of other popular books, including Daniel Levitin's (2006) _This is Your Brain on Music_, Geoff Colvin's (2010) _Talent is Overrated_, Daniel Pink's (2009) _Drive_, Daniel Coyle's (2009) _The Talent Code_, David Shenk's (2010) _The Genius in All of Us_, Matthew Syed's (2010) _Bounce_, and David Brooks' (2011) _The Social Animal_.
> The Ericsson et al. (1993) article has been cited in the scientific literature over a thousand times (source: Web of Science), making it a “citation classic” many times over, and Ericsson and colleagues have been praised for advancing scientific understanding of expert performance. Freeman (2007) observed that “The field of gifted and talented research is in serious need of scientific work of this calibre, as distinct from theories, models and anecdotes” (p. 65), and Kaufman (2007) commented that “The expert performance approach championed by Ericsson et al. provides a scientific way forward for research on giftedness, and offers exciting new ways to further our understanding of the determinants of high ability within a particular domain of expertise” (p. 71).
> At the same time, Ericsson and colleagues' view has been roundly criticized on conceptual and methodological grounds. Gardner (1995) commented that the deliberate practice view “requires a blindness to ordinary experience” (p. 802), and Sternberg (1996) observed that “Most people who want to become experts – whether as violinists, skiers, physicists, or whatever – do not make it. They drop out along the way” (p. 350). Schneider (1998) questioned “the basic assumption that progress in a given domain is solely a function of deliberate practice” (p. 424), and Detterman, Gabriel, and Ruthsatz (1998) predicted that deliberate practice “will not equalize outcome despite the best of intentions” (p. 412). Anderson (2000) concluded that “Ericsson and Krampe's research does not really establish the case that a great deal of practice is sufficient for great talent” (p. 324), and Winner (2000) observed that “Ericsson's research demonstrated the importance of hard work but did not rule out the role of innate ability” (p. 160).
>
> ...That is, can individual differences in performance largely be accounted for by individual differences in deliberate practice? Is deliberate practice essentially all it takes to become an expert?
> To answer this question, we reanalyzed findings from research on the two most widely studied domains in expertise research: chess and music. There were two criteria for including a study in the reanalysis: (a) continuous measures of performance and of cumulative amount of time engaged in activity interpretable as deliberate practice were collected, and (b) a correlation between these measures was reported. For a given study, our question was how much of the variance in performance deliberate practice explained. To foreshadow, we found that deliberate practice does not account for all, nearly all, or even most of the variance in performance in these domains.
>
> ...On average, deliberate practice explained 34% of the variance in [chess] performance after correcting for measurement error variance (avg. r^ = .57; sample size-weighted avg. r^ = .49), leaving 66% of the variance unexplained and potentially explainable by other factors (see Fig. 1). The 95% CI included 1.0 in Bilalić et al. (2007), but the confidence interval was very wide (r^ = .81, 95% CI, .46, 1.0) due to a small sample size (N = 23).5 (Note also that the correlation between practice and chess performance dropped from .69 to .60 after Bilalić et al. statistically controlled for IQ, which yields r^ = .70, 95% CI, .29, .95.)
> ...The implication of this conclusion is that some people require much less deliberate practice than other people to reach an elite level of performance in chess. We illustrate this point in Fig. 2 using Gobet and Campitelli's (2007) chess sample...as the SDs suggest, there were very large ranges of deliberate practice within skill groups. For example, the range for the masters was 832 to 24,284h—8a difference of nearly three orders of magnitude*. Furthermore, there was overlap in distributions between skill groups. For example, of the 16 masters, 31.3% (n = 5) had less deliberate practice than the mean of the expert group, one skill level down, and 12.5% (n = 2) had less deliberate practice than the mean of the intermediate group, *two* skill levels down. In the other direction, of the 31 intermediates, 25.8% (n = 8) had more deliberate practice than the mean of the expert group, one skill level up, and 12.9% (n = 4) had more deliberate practice than the mean of the master group, *two* skill levels up.
> Howard's (2011) case study of the three Polgár sisters provides further support for our conclusion. Beginning at a young age, the sisters received several hours of chess instruction every day from chess grandmasters and their father, a chess teacher and author of several chess books. Using practice estimates obtained from biographical and autobiographical accounts, Howard found that the sisters differed both in the highest rating they achieved and in the amount of practice they accumulated to reach that rating. For example, one sister's peak rating was 2735 in an estimated 59,904 h of practice, whereas another sister's was 2577–more than a standard deviation lower–in an estimated 79,248 h of practice. Howard also found that the two sisters who became grandmasters had accumulated a great deal more practice by the time they reached their peak rating than had the eight grandmasters in his sample who reached top-ten in the world (M = 14,020.5 h, SD = 7373.96 h).
>
> ...Correlations between deliberate practice and music performance, with 95% confidence intervals (CIs), are displayed in Table 3. On average, deliberate practice explained 29.9% of the variance in performance after correcting for measurement error variance (avg. r^ = .52; sample size-weighted avg. r^ =.52), leaving 70.1% of the variance unexplained and potentially explainable by other factors (see Fig. 3). The 95% CI included 1.0 in Ruthsatz et al. (2008), Study 2B, but the confidence interval was extremely wide ( r^ = .68, 95% CI, .14, 1.0) due to a small sample size (N = 19). Note also that the correlation was much smaller in Ruthsatz et al.'s Study 2A (r^ = .39, 95% CI, .09, .65), which used the same method but a larger sample (N = 64).
>
> Ericsson et al.'s (1993) findings provide further support for our conclusion. Ericsson et al. did not report variability statistics for deliberate practice—no standard deviations, variances, or ranges.7 However, the log-transformed values in their Fig. 15 indicate that deliberate practice in their study of pianists (Study 2) ranged from about 10,000 h to 30,000 h in the expert group.8 The most practiced expert could have been no more than 11 years older than the least practiced expert (i.e., age 31 vs. 20), and yet the difference in deliberate practice between these subjects was about 20,000 h...It seems clear that some of Ericsson et al.'s pianists required much less deliberate practice than others to become experts.
>
> [Ericsson:] “An individual starting at an earlier age would have accumulated more deliberate practice and thus have acquired a higher level of performance” (p. 388). A testable prediction that follows from this statement is that the effect of starting age on performance should be mediated through deliberate practice. However, Gobet and Campitelli (2007) and Howard (2012) found that the effect of starting age on chess rating was not mediated through deliberate practice. That is, starting age correlated negatively with chess rating even after statistically controlling for deliberate practice, indicating that the players who started young tended to have an advantage as adult chess players independent of how much deliberate practice they had accumulated. Furthermore, in the study of composers mentioned earlier, Simonton (1991) found that compared with less eminent composers, the greatest composers started music lessons and composition lessons at a younger age and took less time to start making contributions to the repertoire. Taken together, this evidence suggests that there may be a critical period for acquiring complex skills just as there may be for acquiring language.
>
> ...Meinz and Hambrick (2010) found that although deliberate practice accounted [predicted] for nearly half (45.1%) of the variance in pianists' performance on a sight-reading task, working memory capacity accounted for an additional 7.4% of the variance—a statistically and practically significant effect. Ericsson and colleagues have argued that measures of working memory capacity themselves reflect acquired skills (Ericsson & Delaney, 1999; Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995), but working memory capacity and deliberate practice correlated near zero in this study (r = .003).
>
> ...Global measures of intelligence (IQ) have also been found to correlate with performance in chess and music, consistent with the possibility that a relatively high level of intelligence is necessary for success in these domains. Frydman and Lynn (1992) found that young chess players had an average performance IQ of 129, compared to a population average of 100, and that the average was higher for the best players (top-third avg. = 131) in the sample than the weakest players (bottom-third avg. = 124). Furthermore, Grabner, Neubauer, and Stern (2006) found that, even in highly rated players, IQ positively predicted performance on representative chess tasks (e.g., next best move). Bilalić et al. (2007) found that IQ was not a significant predictor of chess rating in the sample of elite young chess players listed in Table 1 after statistically controlling for practice. However, the sample size for the elite group was only 23, and mean IQ was significantly higher for the elite group (M = 133) than for the rest of the sample (M = 114). It has been suggested that chess training may transfer to IQ tests, but there is currently no compelling evidence for this (see Gobet & Campitelli, 2006, for a review). Instead, the effects of chess training appear to be domain-specific. For example, Schneider, Gruber, Gold, and Opwis (1993) found that children who played chess outperformed adults in a chessboard memory task, where- as the adults outperformed the children in a digit recall task.
> IQ correlates positively with music performance, as well. Luce (1965) found a correlation of .53 (p b .01) between IQ and sight-reading performance in high school band members, and Salis (1977) reported a correlation of .58 between these variables in a university sample. Gromko (2004) found positive correlations between both verbal ability and spatial ability (rs = .35–.49) and sight-reading performance in high school wind players, and Hayward and Gromko (2009) found a significant positive correlation (r = .24) between a measure of spatial ability based on three ETS tests and sight-reading performance in university wind players. Ruthsatz et al. (2008) found that Raven's scores correlated positively and significantly with musical achievement in high school band members (r = .25). This correlation was not statistically significant in a sample of more highly accomplished conservatory students and music majors, but this could have been due to a ceiling effect on Raven's, as these participants had been heavily selected for cognitive ability.
> ...Ruthsatz and Urbach (2012) administered a standardized IQ test (the Stanford–Binet) to eight child prodigies, six of whom were musical prodigies. Despite full-scale IQs that ranged from 108 to 147–just above average to above the conventional cutoff for “genius”–all of the prodigies were at or above the 99th percentile for working memory (indeed, six scored at the 99.9th percentile).
>
> ...General intelligence does not *always* predict performance. In a study of football players, Lyons, Hoffman, and Michel (2009) found that scores on the Wonderlic Personnel Test, a widely administered group intelligence test, correlated essentially zero with success in the National Football League, even in the quarterback position, which is believed to place the highest demand on information processing. Furthermore, Hambrick et al. (2012) found that spatial ability positively predicted success in a complex geological problem solving task in novice geologists, but not in experts.
>
> ...The second myth is that it requires at least ten years, or 10,000 hours, of deliberate practice to reach an elite level of performance. Ericsson et al. (2007) explained this idea as follows: “Our research shows that even the most gifted performers need a *minimum* of ten years (or 10,000 hours) of intense training before they win international competitions” (p. 119, emphasis added). Subsequently, Gladwell (2008) proposed in _Outliers_ that “Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness” (p. 41). More recently, the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman (2011) wrote in his book _Thinking, Fast and Slow_ that “Studies of chess masters have shown that at least 10,000 hours of dedicated practice...are required to attain the highest levels of performance” (p. 238). But the data indicate that there is an *enormous* amount of variability in deliberate practice—even in elite performers. One player in Gobet and Campitelli's (2007) chess sample took 26 years of serious involvement in chess to reach a master level, while another player took less than 2 years to reach this level.
--
gwern
http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ
Hambrick et al 2013 http://www.msu.edu/~ema/HambrickEtAl13.pdf
> Twenty years ago, Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer (1993) proposed that expert performance reflects a long period of "deliberate practice" rather than innate ability, or “talent”. Ericsson et al. found that elite musicians had accumulated thousands of hours more deliberate practice than less accomplished musicians, and concluded that their theoretical framework could provide “a sufficient account of the major facts about the nature and scarcity of exceptional performance” (p. 392). The deliberate practice view has since gained popularity as a theoretical account of expert performance, but here we show that deliberate practice is not sufficient to explain individual differences in performance in the two most widely studied domains in expertise research — chess and music. For researchers interested in advancing the science of expert performance, the task now is to develop and rigorously test theories that take into account as many potentially relevant explanatory constructs as possible.
>
> ...Applying their framework to several domains, Ericsson et al. (1993) concluded that “high levels of deliberate practice are necessary to attain expert level performance” (p. 392) — and in the next sentence added the following:
>
> > "Our theoretical framework can *also provide a sufficient account* of the major facts about the nature and scarcity of exceptional performance. Our account does not depend on scarcity of innate ability (talent).... We attribute the dramatic differences in performance between experts and amateurs–novices to similarly large differences in the recorded amounts of deliberate practice" (p. 392, emphasis added).
>
> Ericsson et al. (1993) similarly explained that “individual differences in ultimate performance can largely be accounted for by differential amounts of past and current levels of practice” (p.392) and that “the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain” (p. 400).
> Ericsson et al. (1993) allowed that genes may contribute to individual differences in people's willingness to engage in deliberate practice over a long period of time, and thus may indirectly contribute to individual differences in performance, but as the preceding quotations make clear, they explicitly rejected the view that innate *ability* can account for why some people become experts and others fail to do so.
> Ericsson, Nandagopal, and Roring (2005) recently reiterated this perspective when they wrote that
>
> > "...individual differences in genetically determined capacities and fixed structures required for the development of elite performance appear to be quite limited, perhaps even restricted, to a small number of physical characteristics, such as height and body size. The expert-performance framework attempts to explain the large individual differences in performance in terms of individual differences in sustained deliberate practice" (p. 305).
>
> Similarly, Ericsson (2007) argued that “it is possible to account for the development of elite performance among healthy children without recourse to unique talent (genetic endowment) — excepting the innate determinants of body size” (p. 4) and that “distinctive characteristics of elite performers are adaptations to extended and intense practice activities that selectively activate dormant genes that all healthy children's DNA contain” (p. 4). Ericsson, Prietula, and Cokely (2007) wrote more simply that “The *only* innate differences that turn out to be significant – and they matter primarily in sports – are height and body size” (p. 116, emphasis added).
>
> ...Ericsson and colleagues' research is discussed in a number of other popular books, including Daniel Levitin's (2006) _This is Your Brain on Music_, Geoff Colvin's (2010) _Talent is Overrated_, Daniel Pink's (2009) _Drive_, Daniel Coyle's (2009) _The Talent Code_, David Shenk's (2010) _The Genius in All of Us_, Matthew Syed's (2010) _Bounce_, and David Brooks' (2011) _The Social Animal_.
> The Ericsson et al. (1993) article has been cited in the scientific literature over a thousand times (source: Web of Science), making it a “citation classic” many times over, and Ericsson and colleagues have been praised for advancing scientific understanding of expert performance. Freeman (2007) observed that “The field of gifted and talented research is in serious need of scientific work of this calibre, as distinct from theories, models and anecdotes” (p. 65), and Kaufman (2007) commented that “The expert performance approach championed by Ericsson et al. provides a scientific way forward for research on giftedness, and offers exciting new ways to further our understanding of the determinants of high ability within a particular domain of expertise” (p. 71).
> At the same time, Ericsson and colleagues' view has been roundly criticized on conceptual and methodological grounds. Gardner (1995) commented that the deliberate practice view “requires a blindness to ordinary experience” (p. 802), and Sternberg (1996) observed that “Most people who want to become experts – whether as violinists, skiers, physicists, or whatever – do not make it. They drop out along the way” (p. 350). Schneider (1998) questioned “the basic assumption that progress in a given domain is solely a function of deliberate practice” (p. 424), and Detterman, Gabriel, and Ruthsatz (1998) predicted that deliberate practice “will not equalize outcome despite the best of intentions” (p. 412). Anderson (2000) concluded that “Ericsson and Krampe's research does not really establish the case that a great deal of practice is sufficient for great talent” (p. 324), and Winner (2000) observed that “Ericsson's research demonstrated the importance of hard work but did not rule out the role of innate ability” (p. 160).
>
> ...That is, can individual differences in performance largely be accounted for by individual differences in deliberate practice? Is deliberate practice essentially all it takes to become an expert?
> To answer this question, we reanalyzed findings from research on the two most widely studied domains in expertise research: chess and music. There were two criteria for including a study in the reanalysis: (a) continuous measures of performance and of cumulative amount of time engaged in activity interpretable as deliberate practice were collected, and (b) a correlation between these measures was reported. For a given study, our question was how much of the variance in performance deliberate practice explained. To foreshadow, we found that deliberate practice does not account for all, nearly all, or even most of the variance in performance in these domains.
>
> ...On average, deliberate practice explained 34% of the variance in [chess] performance after correcting for measurement error variance (avg. r^ = .57; sample size-weighted avg. r^ = .49), leaving 66% of the variance unexplained and potentially explainable by other factors (see Fig. 1). The 95% CI included 1.0 in Bilalić et al. (2007), but the confidence interval was very wide (r^ = .81, 95% CI, .46, 1.0) due to a small sample size (N = 23).5 (Note also that the correlation between practice and chess performance dropped from .69 to .60 after Bilalić et al. statistically controlled for IQ, which yields r^ = .70, 95% CI, .29, .95.)
> ...The implication of this conclusion is that some people require much less deliberate practice than other people to reach an elite level of performance in chess. We illustrate this point in Fig. 2 using Gobet and Campitelli's (2007) chess sample...as the SDs suggest, there were very large ranges of deliberate practice within skill groups. For example, the range for the masters was 832 to 24,284h—8a difference of nearly three orders of magnitude*. Furthermore, there was overlap in distributions between skill groups. For example, of the 16 masters, 31.3% (n = 5) had less deliberate practice than the mean of the expert group, one skill level down, and 12.5% (n = 2) had less deliberate practice than the mean of the intermediate group, *two* skill levels down. In the other direction, of the 31 intermediates, 25.8% (n = 8) had more deliberate practice than the mean of the expert group, one skill level up, and 12.9% (n = 4) had more deliberate practice than the mean of the master group, *two* skill levels up.
> Howard's (2011) case study of the three Polgár sisters provides further support for our conclusion. Beginning at a young age, the sisters received several hours of chess instruction every day from chess grandmasters and their father, a chess teacher and author of several chess books. Using practice estimates obtained from biographical and autobiographical accounts, Howard found that the sisters differed both in the highest rating they achieved and in the amount of practice they accumulated to reach that rating. For example, one sister's peak rating was 2735 in an estimated 59,904 h of practice, whereas another sister's was 2577–more than a standard deviation lower–in an estimated 79,248 h of practice. Howard also found that the two sisters who became grandmasters had accumulated a great deal more practice by the time they reached their peak rating than had the eight grandmasters in his sample who reached top-ten in the world (M = 14,020.5 h, SD = 7373.96 h).
>
> ...Correlations between deliberate practice and music performance, with 95% confidence intervals (CIs), are displayed in Table 3. On average, deliberate practice explained 29.9% of the variance in performance after correcting for measurement error variance (avg. r^ = .52; sample size-weighted avg. r^ =.52), leaving 70.1% of the variance unexplained and potentially explainable by other factors (see Fig. 3). The 95% CI included 1.0 in Ruthsatz et al. (2008), Study 2B, but the confidence interval was extremely wide ( r^ = .68, 95% CI, .14, 1.0) due to a small sample size (N = 19). Note also that the correlation was much smaller in Ruthsatz et al.'s Study 2A (r^ = .39, 95% CI, .09, .65), which used the same method but a larger sample (N = 64).
>
> Ericsson et al.'s (1993) findings provide further support for our conclusion. Ericsson et al. did not report variability statistics for deliberate practice—no standard deviations, variances, or ranges.7 However, the log-transformed values in their Fig. 15 indicate that deliberate practice in their study of pianists (Study 2) ranged from about 10,000 h to 30,000 h in the expert group.8 The most practiced expert could have been no more than 11 years older than the least practiced expert (i.e., age 31 vs. 20), and yet the difference in deliberate practice between these subjects was about 20,000 h...It seems clear that some of Ericsson et al.'s pianists required much less deliberate practice than others to become experts.
>
> [Ericsson:] “An individual starting at an earlier age would have accumulated more deliberate practice and thus have acquired a higher level of performance” (p. 388). A testable prediction that follows from this statement is that the effect of starting age on performance should be mediated through deliberate practice. However, Gobet and Campitelli (2007) and Howard (2012) found that the effect of starting age on chess rating was not mediated through deliberate practice. That is, starting age correlated negatively with chess rating even after statistically controlling for deliberate practice, indicating that the players who started young tended to have an advantage as adult chess players independent of how much deliberate practice they had accumulated. Furthermore, in the study of composers mentioned earlier, Simonton (1991) found that compared with less eminent composers, the greatest composers started music lessons and composition lessons at a younger age and took less time to start making contributions to the repertoire. Taken together, this evidence suggests that there may be a critical period for acquiring complex skills just as there may be for acquiring language.
>
> ...Meinz and Hambrick (2010) found that although deliberate practice accounted [predicted] for nearly half (45.1%) of the variance in pianists' performance on a sight-reading task, working memory capacity accounted for an additional 7.4% of the variance—a statistically and practically significant effect. Ericsson and colleagues have argued that measures of working memory capacity themselves reflect acquired skills (Ericsson & Delaney, 1999; Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995), but working memory capacity and deliberate practice correlated near zero in this study (r = .003).
>
> ...Global measures of intelligence (IQ) have also been found to correlate with performance in chess and music, consistent with the possibility that a relatively high level of intelligence is necessary for success in these domains. Frydman and Lynn (1992) found that young chess players had an average performance IQ of 129, compared to a population average of 100, and that the average was higher for the best players (top-third avg. = 131) in the sample than the weakest players (bottom-third avg. = 124). Furthermore, Grabner, Neubauer, and Stern (2006) found that, even in highly rated players, IQ positively predicted performance on representative chess tasks (e.g., next best move). Bilalić et al. (2007) found that IQ was not a significant predictor of chess rating in the sample of elite young chess players listed in Table 1 after statistically controlling for practice. However, the sample size for the elite group was only 23, and mean IQ was significantly higher for the elite group (M = 133) than for the rest of the sample (M = 114). It has been suggested that chess training may transfer to IQ tests, but there is currently no compelling evidence for this (see Gobet & Campitelli, 2006, for a review). Instead, the effects of chess training appear to be domain-specific. For example, Schneider, Gruber, Gold, and Opwis (1993) found that children who played chess outperformed adults in a chessboard memory task, where- as the adults outperformed the children in a digit recall task.
> IQ correlates positively with music performance, as well. Luce (1965) found a correlation of .53 (p b .01) between IQ and sight-reading performance in high school band members, and Salis (1977) reported a correlation of .58 between these variables in a university sample. Gromko (2004) found positive correlations between both verbal ability and spatial ability (rs = .35–.49) and sight-reading performance in high school wind players, and Hayward and Gromko (2009) found a significant positive correlation (r = .24) between a measure of spatial ability based on three ETS tests and sight-reading performance in university wind players. Ruthsatz et al. (2008) found that Raven's scores correlated positively and significantly with musical achievement in high school band members (r = .25). This correlation was not statistically significant in a sample of more highly accomplished conservatory students and music majors, but this could have been due to a ceiling effect on Raven's, as these participants had been heavily selected for cognitive ability.
> ...Ruthsatz and Urbach (2012) administered a standardized IQ test (the Stanford–Binet) to eight child prodigies, six of whom were musical prodigies. Despite full-scale IQs that ranged from 108 to 147–just above average to above the conventional cutoff for “genius”–all of the prodigies were at or above the 99th percentile for working memory (indeed, six scored at the 99.9th percentile).
>
> ...General intelligence does not *always* predict performance. In a study of football players, Lyons, Hoffman, and Michel (2009) found that scores on the Wonderlic Personnel Test, a widely administered group intelligence test, correlated essentially zero with success in the National Football League, even in the quarterback position, which is believed to place the highest demand on information processing. Furthermore, Hambrick et al. (2012) found that spatial ability positively predicted success in a complex geological problem solving task in novice geologists, but not in experts.
>
> ...The second myth is that it requires at least ten years, or 10,000 hours, of deliberate practice to reach an elite level of performance. Ericsson et al. (2007) explained this idea as follows: “Our research shows that even the most gifted performers need a *minimum* of ten years (or 10,000 hours) of intense training before they win international competitions” (p. 119, emphasis added). Subsequently, Gladwell (2008) proposed in _Outliers_ that “Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness” (p. 41). More recently, the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman (2011) wrote in his book _Thinking, Fast and Slow_ that “Studies of chess masters have shown that at least 10,000 hours of dedicated practice...are required to attain the highest levels of performance” (p. 238). But the data indicate that there is an *enormous* amount of variability in deliberate practice—even in elite performers. One player in Gobet and Campitelli's (2007) chess sample took 26 years of serious involvement in chess to reach a master level, while another player took less than 2 years to reach this level.
--
gwern
http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ
FerrousFerriss
Jun 13, 2013, 4:14:53 PM6/13/13
to brain-t...@googlegroups.com, gw...@gwern.net
Do the best you can, with what you have.
sai kit Lo
Jun 14, 2013, 1:51:37 AM6/14/13
to brain-t...@googlegroups.com, gw...@gwern.net
I don't think the best practice for chess is playing chess... This is why some elite players who practice chess by playing chess can spend too much time before they achieve a high level, while other elite players seem to frogleap to the same level.
Like many sports, or martial arts, you don't learn the game just by playing the games. Most sports or arts are complex. You learn complex skills by cross-training, diets, sport psychology, technology... etc
Like shaolin monks, they practice a number of things through the day to master combat skills. They dont learn to fight just by fighting. I think elite experts sometimes achieve their levels not by repetition, but they somehow acquire skills from other activities as well.
Plus we need to take learning disabilities into account, for examples, adhd, comprehension, poor coordinations... each requires specific treatment to "cure".
The brain is plastic. But it takes intelligently designed activities to stimulate each part to become what we want it to be---to wire it in a certain way. It seems dumb to assume that one can master something such as chess by playing chess again and again. If the player has very poor visual memory, or working memory, or poor diet, or he doesn't reflect on his games and remember his mistakes, it would take much longer for him to master the game.
jotaro
Jun 14, 2013, 2:44:35 AM6/14/13
to brain-t...@googlegroups.com
yethe real challenge is to design intelligently designed activities
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dumbothelephant
Jun 14, 2013, 9:58:11 AM6/14/13
to brain-t...@googlegroups.com, gw...@gwern.net
gwern , what do you think about this essay :
dumbothelephant
Jun 14, 2013, 10:02:24 AM6/14/13
to brain-t...@googlegroups.com, gw...@gwern.net
More from the same author : (I think he references the same study gwern cited)
http://www.sportsscientists.com/2011/08/training-talent-10000-hours-and-genes.htmlGwern Branwen
Jul 2, 2014, 6:31:37 PM7/2/14
to N-back
On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 9:19 PM, Gwern Branwen <gw...@gwern.net> wrote:
> "Deliberate practice: Is that all it takes to become an expert?",
> Hambrick et al 2013 http://www.msu.edu/~ema/HambrickEtAl13.pdf
This paper seems to have been officially published now; I'm not sure
> "Deliberate practice: Is that all it takes to become an expert?",
> Hambrick et al 2013 http://www.msu.edu/~ema/HambrickEtAl13.pdf
whether any changes were made from that version.
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2014/06/exploding-10000-hours-myth-its-no.html
> Swedish psychologist K. Anders Ericsson has studied elite performers in music, chess and sport for decades, and he says the main distinguishing characteristic of experts is the amount of deliberate practice they've invested - typically over 10,000 hours.
>
> But now a team led by David Hambrick have published a forceful challenge to the 10,000 myth [Hambrick, D., Oswald, F., Altmann, E., Meinz, E., Gobet, F., & Campitelli, G. (2014). "Deliberate practice: Is that all it takes to become an expert?" _Intelligence_, 45, 34-45 DOI: 10.1016/j.intell.2013.04.001 ]. "We found that deliberate practice does not account for all, nearly all, or even most variance in [elite music or chess] performance," they write. The researchers looked for studies into chess players that provided information on people's highest ability level achieved and their past history of practice. They found six studies supplying this information, published between 2005 and 2012, and involving collectively over 1000 players from around the world. On average, amount of deliberate practice accounted for 34 per cent of variance in chess ability - an impressive proportion, but by no means sufficient to explain why some players achieved greatness while others didn't. Even more revealing was the huge range of deliberate practice completed by players of different standards. Focusing only on the grandmasters from one study, the range of practice they'd invested was 832 to 24,284 hours. Looking at players who achieved only intermediate level, 13 per cent of them had actually completed more practice than the average amount invested by the grandmasters. Hambrick's team performed a similar analysis with past studies involving hundreds of elite musicians - mostly pianists. Based on eight past papers, they found deliberate practice accounted for 30 per cent of the variance in music performance, as measured by formal tests, expert ratings and rankings. Again there was evidence of wide variation in the the amount of practice completed by different musicians. The take-out was clear - some people failed to achieve the highest level even after completing substantially more than 10,000 of practice; others achieved the highest level with only relatively modest practice.
--
gwern
http://www.gwern.net
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