“Predicting Musical Aptitude and Achievement: Practice, Teaching, and Intelligence”, 2019-09 ():
Studies of expertise have traditionally had a strong focus on the role of one single factor, i.e. long-term deliberate practice, for expert performance. However, recent empirical and theoretical work strongly suggests that expertise is a function of many variables that may have practice-independent effects on performance, but also moderate the efficacy of practice itself.
Here we study such interaction effects in a large cohort (n > 4,500) of Swedish twins, using music as a model domain, and measured expert performance (musical auditory discrimination) as well as self-reported real-life achievement as indices of expertise. Specifically, we test 2 recently proposed hypotheses, i.e. 1. that the efficacy of practice increases if the individual also takes part in teacher-led lessons, and 2. that practice efficacy increases with higher intelligence.
The results did not support the first hypothesis. Both practice and frequency of music lessons had positive associations with the 2 measures of expertise but, contrary to predictions, the interaction between them was negative, i.e. the effect of each practiced hour decreased with more lessons. In contrast, the second hypothesis was supported by the data, i.e. we found a positive interaction between practice and intelligence, suggesting that higher cognitive ability is related to more efficient practice behaviors.
Together the results further support that domain-specific expertise is a complex outcome, which depends on an interplay of a variety of factors.
[Keywords: expertise, training, music, IQ, ability]