Originally posted by Mahout
But isn't the 10,000 hours only part of the equation. A prerequisite maybe, but not the only
factor. Are there not people who have put in the hours but not achieved? Football might be worth
considering as there's a lot of kids putting in the hours but only very few ever make the
premiership or it's equivalent. Of the thousands of kids who make the academ etter.
This is not to deny that 10,000 hours of proper study would not improve your game.
'deliberate practice' is a psychology term focusing exactly on that, in contrast to even decades of 'idling' without improvement on your selected area of expertise. the latter has also been well documented.
just go google 'expert performance psychology' or something like that, and you'll get all the studies you could ever want. in addition to the de groot classics, k.a. ericsson has also loads of extremely relevant studies on expertise.
like this one on talent:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/files/u81/Ericsson__Roring__and_Nandagopal__2007_.pdf
here's a snippet on memory:
"In this paper we will approach the issues of gifts and innate talent a little
differently. Rather than create new definitions and global theories, we apply the
analytical methods of the expert performance approach and focus on the empirical
evidence for reproducibly superior performance. Given that this framework differs
from the traditional studies of giftedness, we will briefly sketch the development of
the expert performance approach. The first author initially encountered the issues of
giftedness in his studies on exceptional memory, where there is an extensive body
of research on individuals with ‘gifted’ memory. Many years ago, Bill Chase and
the first author (Ericsson et al., 1980) tried to replicate an early study where several
students were able to double their performance on a test of short-term memory with
a few weeks of practice. They invited a college student (SF) to engage in memory
practice for a few hours per week. Before the start of training SF could recall around
seven presented digits—the typical performance for college students (Miller, 1956).
After several hundred hours of practice he dramatically exceeded the original target
of doubling his memory performance and was able to perfectly recall over 80
presented digits—an enormous improvement of performance corresponding to an
effect size of over 70 standard deviations. These large training effects on memory
performance have been replicated many times with many participants in several
independent laboratories (see Wilding & Valentine, 1997, 2006; Ericsson, 2003a).
These studies demonstrated that individuals can increase their memory
performance by orders of magnitude through training (without any changes in their
DNA), and that the levels of post-training performance dramatically surpassed levels
of many individuals thought to possess innately superior memory in earlier studies
(Ericsson, 1985). Such findings question whether innate gifts or talents are required
for an individual to reach the levels of memory skill that were initially considered
extraordinary by early researchers (e.g., Luria, 1986, first published 1968). In
addition, the trained students exhibited several other observable characteristics of
allegedly exceptional individuals, such as flexible retrieval of the memorized
information (see Ericsson & Chase, 1982). Furthermore, the encoding and retrieval
mechanisms acquired by the students were investigated and experimentally validated
as mediating the superior performance (Ericsson, 1988, 2004)."
Anyone studying chess? Read this post...
04 Jul '09 16:08
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