Expert Performance Its Structure and Acquisition

Counter to the common belief that expert performance reflects innate abilities and capacities, recent research in different domains of expertise has shown that expert performance is predominantly mediated by acquired complex skills and physiological adaptations. For elite performers, supervised practice starts at very young ages and is maintained at high daily levels for more than a decade. The effects of extended deliberate practice are more far-reaching than is commonly believed. Performers can acquire skills that circumvent basic limits on working memory capacity and sequential processing. Deliberate practice can also lead to anatomical changes resulting from adaptations to intense physical activity. The study of expert performance has important implications for our understanding of the structure and limits of human adaptation and optimal learning. In nearly every field of human endeavor, the performance of the best practitioners is so outstanding, so superior even to the performance of other highly experienced individuals in the field, that most people believe a unique, qualitative attribute, commonly called innate talent, must be invoked to account for this highest level of performance. Although these differences in performance are by far the largest psychologists have been able to reliably measure among healthy adults, exceptional performance has not, until recently, been extensively studied by scientists. In the last decade, interest in outstanding and exceptional achievements and performance has increased dramatically. Many books have been recently published on the topic of genius (for example, Gardner, 1993a ; Murray, 1989a ; Simonton, 1984 , 1988b ; Weisberg, 1986 , 1993 ), exceptionally creative individuals ( D. B. Wallace & Gruber, 1989 ), prodigies ( Feldman, 1986 ; A. Wallace, 1986 ), and exceptional performance and performers ( Howe, 1990 ; Radford, 1990 ; Smith, 1983 ). Of particular interest to the general public has been the remarkable ability of idiot savants or savants, who in spite of a very low general intellectual functioning display superior performance in specific tasks and domains, such as mental multiplication and recall of music ( Howe, 1990 ; Treffert, 1989 ). The pioneering research comparing the performance of experts and beginners (novices) by de Groot (1946/1978) and Chase and Simon (1973) has generated a great deal of research ( Chi, Glaser, & Farr, 1988 ; Ericsson & Smith, 1991b ). A parallel development in computer science has sought to extract the knowledge of experts by interviews ( Hoffman, 1992 ) to build expert systems, which are computer models that are designed to duplicate the performance of these experts and make their expertise generally available. These efforts at artificial intelligence have been most successful in domains that have established symbolic representations, such as mathematical calculation, chess, and music ( Barr & Feigenbaum, 1981—1982 : Cohen & Feigenbaum, 1982 ), which incidentally are the main domains in which prodigies and savants have been able to display clearly superior performance ( Feldman, 1980 , 1986 ). 1 The recent advances in our understanding of exceptional performance have had little impact on general theories in psychology. The new knowledge has not fulfilled the humanistic goals of gaining insights from the lives of outstanding people about how people might improve their lives. Maslow (1971) long ago eloquently expressed these goals: If we want to know how fast a human being can run, then it is no use to average out the speed of a "good sample" of the population; it is far better to collect Olympic gold medal winners and see how well they can do. If we want to know the possibilities for spiritual growth, value growth, or moral development in human beings, then I maintain that we can learn most by studying our moral, ethical, or saintly people....Even when "good specimens," the saints and sages and great leaders of history, have been available for study, the temptation too often has been to consider them not human but supernaturally endowed. (p. 7) American Psychologist © 1994 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. August 1994 Vol. 49, No. 8, 725-747 For personal use only--not for distribution. The reasons for the lack of impact become clear when we consider the two most dominant approaches and their respective goals. The human information-processing approach, or the skills approach, has attempted to explain exceptional performance in terms of knowledge and skills acquired through experience. This approach, originally developed by Newell and Simon (1972) , has tried to show that the basic information-processing system with its elementary information processes and basic capacities remains intact during skill acquisition and that outstanding performance results from incremental increases in knowledge and skill due to the extended effects of experience. By constraining the changes to acquired knowledge and skill, this approach has been able to account for exceptional performance within existing general theories of human cognition. According to this approach the mechanisms identified in laboratory studies of learning can be extrapolated to account for expertise and expert performance by an incremental accumulation of knowledge and skill over a decade of intense experience in the domain. The long duration of the necessary period of experience and the presumed vast complexity of the accumulated knowledge has discouraged investigators from empirically studying the acquisition of expert performance. Similarly, individual differences in expert performance, when the amount of experience is controlled, have not been of major interest and have been typically assumed to reflect differences in the original structure of basic processes, capacities, and abilities. The other major approach focuses on the individual differences of exceptional performers that would allow them to succeed in a specific domain. One of the most influential representatives of this approach is Howard Gardner, who in 1983 presented his theory of multiple intelligence in his book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (hereinafter referred to as Frames of Mind). Gardner (1983 , 1993a , 1993b) drew on the recent advances in biology and brain physiology about neural mechanisms and localization of brain activity to propose an account of the achievements of savants, prodigies, and geniuses in specific domains. He argued that exceptional performance results from a close match between the individual's intelligence profile and the demands of the particular domain. A major concern in this approach is the early identification and nurturing of children with high levels of the required intelligence for a specific domain. Findings within this approach have limited implications for the lives of the vast majority of children and adults of average abilities and talents. In this article we propose a different approach to the study of exceptional performance and achievement, which we refer to as the study of expert performance. Drawing on our earlier published research, we focus on reproducible, empirical phenomena of superior performance. We will thus not seriously consider anecdotes or unique, events, including major artistic and scientific innovations, because they cannot be repeatedly reproduced on demand and hence fall outside the class of phenomena that can be studied by experimental methods. Our approach involves the identification of reproducible superior performance in the everyday life of exceptional performers and the capture of this performance under laboratory conditions. Later we show that the analysis of captured superior performance reveals that extended training alters the cognitive and physiological processes of experts to a greater degree than is commonly believed possible. In the final section of the article we review results from studying the lives of expert performers and identify the central role of large amounts of focused training (deliberate practice), which we distinguish from other forms of experience in a domain. The recent evidence for far-reaching effects of training leads us to start by reexamining the available evidence for innate talent and specific gifts as necessary conditions for attaining the highest levels of performance in a domain. Traditional View of the Role of Talent in Exceptional Performance Since the emergence of civilization, philosophers have speculated about the origin of highly desirable individual attributes, such as poetic ability, physical beauty, strength, wisdom, and skill in handiwork ( Murray, 1989b ). It was generally believed that these attributes were gifts from the gods, and it was commonly recognized that "On the whole the gods do not bestow more than one gift on a person" ( Murray, 1989b, p. 11 ). This view persisted in early Greek thought, although direct divine intervention was replaced by natural causes. Ever since, there has been a bias toward attributing high abilities to gifts rather than experience, as expressed by John Stuart Mill, there is "a common tendency among mankind to consider all power which is not visibly the effect of practice, all skill which is not capable of being reduced to mechanical rules, as the result of a particular gift" (quoted in Murray, 1989b, p. 12 ). One important reason for this bias in attribution, we believe, is linked to immediate legitimatization of various activities associated with the gifts. If the gods have bestowed a child with a special gift in a given art form, who would dare to oppose its development, and who would not facilitate its expression so everyone could enjoy its wonderful creations? This argument may appear strange today, but before the French Revolution the privileged status of kings and nobility and the birthright of their children were primarily based on such claims. The first systematic development of this argument for gaining social recognition