Summary of Lecture 1 from Den Hartigh: Introduction to the course
Introduction to Perusall
The mechanisms underlying talent development and creativity: A historical overview
Defining Talent and Creativity
> Does this individual has talent?
→ swimmer
→ Ethan the piano boy (most talented)
→ boy working on marble track
> Is this creative?
→ piano playing (only reproduction of piano piece but not creative)
→ Iphone (innovative because at that time added something which not existed before)
• Talent:
◦ classically equated with giftedness
◦ Oxford dictionary: “Natural aptitude or skill”
◦ Cambridge dictionary: “(someone who has) a natural ability to be good at something,
especially without being taught”
◦ “talent may instead emerge from a multidimensional, multiplicative and dynamic
process”
→ potential to reach excellence in future
◦ high performance relative to others (normative approach) → between person
comparison (e.g. Ethan the Piano Guy)
◦ improving performance relative to one’s previous performance (ipsative approach) →
within person (e.g. boy with marble track)
▪ from this point of you one could say that everyone is talented because everyone
improves over time
▪ important for education
◦ high performance relative to criterium (criterion approach) → do you meat certain
standards? And if that is the case, than you are talented
▪ e.g. let children do a sprint test and select those to program who did it in a certain
time
• Creativity:
◦ creating or producing something “new”: Original, useful surprising
▪ the creative output (e.g. Iphone)
▪ the (developing process) (e.g. boy with marble track)
▪ ipsative (iphone) or normative (marble track)
• The Complexity of Greatness (Kaufman, 2013)
◦ excellent levels of performance (normative perspective)
◦ How do we get there?
◦ We should “make an effort to understand all the many complex, nuanced factors,
contributing its emergence”
▪ should we?
History
First ideas on talent and creativity
• talent is located in the person (Nature) → Sir Francis Galton (1869)
• talent is elicited by the environment (Nurture) → Alphonse e Candolle (1873)
• Famous researcher on Talent Development and Expertise at our faculty: study with chess
players to explore where expertise is coming from
◦ chess is cognitive task so memory skills are probably important
, ◦ showed chess board with random order to high and low level chess players
◦ then had to reconstruct what they had seen on chess board
→ both performed about the same
◦ when placed chess figure in meaningful order
◦ had to reconstruct what they saw
→ grand masters did excellent and way better than lower trained chess players
◦ thought that through training excellent players better able to recognize patterns and
recall it later on
◦ very general cognitive task where one normally would think that memory is important,
however, still very domain-specific since the skills you need are domain-specific
→ expertise seems domain-specific & many hours of practice mandatory
Are Genes the Driving Force?
• Evidence for genetic factors
◦ Domain general
▪ heritability of IQ
▪ HERITAGE project in sport and exercise → difference within families were much
smaller than between families (50% determinant)
◦ Twin studies
▪ compute heritability coefficient
▪ heritability of intelligence is about .78 → at least to some part heritable
→ studies not domain-specific
• Explaining Talent and creativity
◦ Evidence for innate factors
▪ child prodigies (e.g. Ethan the Piano Boy) → show talent at early age so probably to
some part innate
• however, for example Mozart also considered as child prodigy, however, his
father already was a composer, older sister played piano and when was 3 he was
already very interested in his sister playing → lot of exposure to music at young
age
▪ domain-specific excellence at early age
▪ but often retrospective reports
→ genes play a role in general measures
→ identifying exact proportions and the role of (single) genes remains difficult
→ the extent to which genes play a role in domain-specific talent and creativity remains undefined
• and may even vary within domains
The Role of the Environment
• the role of nurturing factors
◦ family influences during development
◦ Example: Cote (1999)
▪ thought that family plays different roles throughout talent development
▪ first, when child gets interested in specific sport it is mostly about having fund; but
in specializing years (13-15) child picks one particular sport and then parents start to
be more engaged; after being 15 years old (investment years) the sport becomes a
central part of family life (emotions of child, injuries, more practice) → change over
time to help child develop talent in sport
▪ coach/teacher as significant other (can stimulate learning through connecting with
students: The Curios Minds project)
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