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The article and the conclusions of the underlying study bring up more questions than answers for me. Such as: 1) Does the importance of talent vary by domain?

The article and the conclusions of the underlying study bring up more questions than answers for me. Such as: 1) Does the importance of talent vary by domain? 2) They show working memory matters. Does working memory matter by different amounts in different domains? 3) What other "talent" factors work across different domains? 4) To what extent does having natural talent in an area lead to the development of poor work habits (because things come so easily) and thus long-term underperformance? I don't have answers, but I believe that drawing firm conclusions about the talent/practice question is premature.

tokenadult 15y ago
A primary question, of course, is how malleable working memory is to practice effects. The experimental research shows that improvement in domain-specific working memory is very malleable under deliberate practice. http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.hp.html http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.hp.html http://www.psy.cmu.edu/chasepapers/Acquisition%20of%20a%20Memory%20Skill.pdf http://www.psy.cmu.edu/chasepapers/Acquisition%20of%20a%20Me...
azernik 15y ago
WRT 2: Working memory capacity is (according to one well-regarded theoretical model) actually a series of different components - the phonological loop (stores verbal/phonological/textual data, can hold just about the seven digits of a phone number), the visual/spatial sketchpad (can hold representations of images - not sure there's as straightforward of a measure of its capacity), the episodic buffer (not so clear it exists - separate component for integrating different components), and the executive system (controls attention, attending to specific bits of input). Many of these are confirmed theoretically by constructing experiments to overload one memory component, and then checking to see what other capabilities still have spare capacity. While an individual's capacity in each of these components is pretty fixed, there is some variance in what component of working memory a task exercises. In addition it might be that some tasks might lend themselves to good compression. For example, an even lightly experienced programmer thinking about a for loop might not require one "slot" of phonological memory each for the index, start, finish, and label, but could rather represent the entire structure as "for loop" in their phonological memory, this single unit acting as a reference to the long-term memory representation of iteration. In this way, while working memory in its raw form is rather constant over different types of tasks, the actual amount of semantic information it contains may vary widely with task domain. Lastly, mnemonic strategies matter a lot. For example, it might make a big difference to a music learner whether, when sight-reading, they process a piece in their phonlogical loop ("the notes are A-G-G-A") or in their visual-spatial sketchpad ("This bunch of dots is the shape of the tune on the page").

tokenadult 15y ago

A primary question, of course, is how malleable working memory is to practice effects. The experimental research shows that improvement in domain-specific working memory is very malleable under deliberate practice. http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.hp.html http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.hp.html http://www.psy.cmu.edu/chasepapers/Acquisition%20of%20a%20Memory%20Skill.pdf http://www.psy.cmu.edu/chasepapers/Acquisition%20of%20a%20Me...

azernik 15y ago

WRT 2: Working memory capacity is (according to one well-regarded theoretical model) actually a series of different components - the phonological loop (stores verbal/phonological/textual data, can hold just about the seven digits of a phone number), the visual/spatial sketchpad (can hold representations of images - not sure there's as straightforward of a measure of its capacity), the episodic buffer (not so clear it exists - separate component for integrating different components), and the executive system (controls attention, attending to specific bits of input). Many of these are confirmed theoretically by constructing experiments to overload one memory component, and then checking to see what other capabilities still have spare capacity. While an individual's capacity in each of these components is pretty fixed, there is some variance in what component of working memory a task exercises. In addition it might be that some tasks might lend themselves to good compression. For example, an even lightly experienced programmer thinking about a for loop might not require one "slot" of phonological memory each for the index, start, finish, and label, but could rather represent the entire structure as "for loop" in their phonological memory, this single unit acting as a reference to the long-term memory representation of iteration. In this way, while working memory in its raw form is rather constant over different types of tasks, the actual amount of semantic information it contains may vary widely with task domain. Lastly, mnemonic strategies matter a lot. For example, it might make a big difference to a music learner whether, when sight-reading, they process a piece in their phonlogical loop ("the notes are A-G-G-A") or in their visual-spatial sketchpad ("This bunch of dots is the shape of the tune on the page").