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Testing the Deliberate Practice Theory: Does Practice Reduce the Heritability of Musical Expertise?
by Miriam A. Mosing 1,2,3,*,Karin J. H. Verweij 4,David Z. Hambrick 5,Nancy L. Pedersen 3ORCID andFredrik Ullén 1,2
1
Department of Cognitive Neuropsychology, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Grüneburgweg 14, 60322 Frankfurt am Main, Germany
2
Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, SE-171 77 Stockholm, Sweden
3
Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Karolinska Institutet, SE-171 77 Stockholm, Sweden
4
Department of Psychiatry, Amsterdam UMC, University of Amsterdam, Meibergdreef 9, 1105 AZ Amsterdam, The Netherlands
5
Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
J. Intell. 2024, 12(9), 87; https://doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence12090087
Submission received: 22 July 2024 / Revised: 27 August 2024 / Accepted: 5 September 2024 / Published: 8 September 2024
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Skill Acquisition, Expertise, and Achievement)
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Abstract
The deliberate practice (DP) theory claims that expertise essentially reflects the accumulated amount of deliberate practice, and that with sufficient practice, genetic influences on expertise will be bypassed. Thus, a core prediction of the DP theory is that genetic effects on performance decrease as a function of practice. Here, we test this prediction using music as a model domain. Musical expertise (measured with a musical auditory discrimination test) and lifetime practice hours were determined in 6471 twins including 1302 complete twin pairs. We fitted a bivariate Cholesky decomposition with practice hours as a moderator to determine to what extent genetic and environmental influences on musical expertise are influenced by practice hours. On average, 50% of individual differences in musical expertise were due to genetic influences, whereas shared environmental and residual influences each explained about 25%. Importantly, music practice significantly moderated these estimates. Variation in musical expertise decreased with more practice hours due to decreased shared environmental and residual variance. In contrast, the overall genetic component was unaffected by the number of practice hours. Consequently, the relative genetic contribution (heritability) increased with more practice hours. These findings are in contrast with predictions from the DP theory and suggest that genetic predisposition remains important for musical expertise even after prolonged practice.
