OBJECTIVE:This study examined use of strategies by twins during cognitive tasks to determine the effects of strategy-use on estimates of heritability.BACKGROUND:Performance on many cognitive tasks has been found to be more similar for monozygotic (MZ) than dizygotic (DZ) twins. The cognitive mechanisms mediating these similarities are largely unknown.METHODS:Think-aloud protocol analysis was used during 3 cognitive tasks typically considered to have high heritability and susceptibility to strategy-use. In addition, a battery of traditional paper tests was administered to examine potential effects of cognitive abilities.RESULTS:Performance on 3 cognitive tasks showed effects of strategies, and performance on 2 of the tasks showed a genetic influence. On 1 of these tasks differences in strategies explained a significant portion of the genetic influences. Measures of cognitive ability and metacognitive knowledge could not explain individual differences in strategy use.CONCLUSIONS:This is the first demonstration that the estimated heritability of performance on cognitive tasks is mediated, at least in part, by the use of specific cognitive strategies. Future studies using similar techniques will permit a description of the development of cognitive mechanisms mediating heritable cognitive abilities, and a deeper understanding of the integration of genetic and environmental factors at the level of cognitive strategies and processes.

Exceptional performance is frequently attributed to genetic differences in talent. Since Sir Francis Galton's book, Hereditary Genius , many scientists have cited heritable factors that set limits of performance and only allow some individuals to attain exceptional levels. However, thus far these accounts have not explicated the causal processes involved in the activation and expression of unique genes in DNA that lead to the emergence of distinctive physiological attributes and cognitive capacities (innate talent). This article argues on the basis of our current knowledge that it is possible to account for the development of elite performance among healthy children without recourse to innate talent (genetic endowment)—excepting the innate determinants of body size. Our account is based on the expert‐performance approach and proposes that the distinctive characteristics of exceptional performers are the result of adaptations to extended and intense practice activities that selectively activate dormant genes that are contained within all healthy individuals’ DNA. Furthermore, the theoretical framework of expert performance explains the apparent emergence of early talent by identifying factors that influence starting ages for training and the accumulated engagement in sustained extended deliberate practice, such as motivation, parental support, and access to the best training environments and teachers. In sum, our empirical investigations and extensive reviews show that the development of expert performance will be primarily constrained by individuals’ engagement in deliberate practice and the quality of the available training resources.

Exceptional performance is frequently attributed to genetic differences in talent. Since Sir Francis Galton's book, Hereditary Genius , many scientists have cited heritable factors that set limits of performance and only allow some individuals to attain exceptional levels. However, thus far these accounts have not explicated the causal processes involved in the activation and expression of unique genes in DNA that lead to the emergence of distinctive physiological attributes and cognitive capacities (innate talent). This article argues on the basis of our current knowledge that it is possible to account for the development of elite performance among healthy children without recourse to innate talent (genetic endowment)—excepting the innate determinants of body size. Our account is based on the expert-performance approach and proposes that the distinctive characteristics of exceptional performers are the result of adaptations to extended and intense practice activities that selectively activate dormant genes that are contained within all healthy individuals’ DNA. Furthermore, the theoretical framework of expert performance explains the apparent emergence of early talent by identifying factors that influence starting ages for training and the accumulated engagement in sustained extended deliberate practice, such as motivation, parental support, and access to the best training environments and teachers. In sum, our empirical investigations and extensive reviews show that the development of expert performance will be primarily constrained by individuals’ engagement in deliberate practice and the quality of the available training resources.

Elementary cognitive tasks (ECTs) are simple tasks involving basic cognitive processes for which speed of performance typically correlates with IQ. Inspection time (IT) has the strongest IQ correlations and is considered critical evidence for neural speed underlying individual differences in intelligence. However, results from Bors et al. [Bors, D.A., Stokes, T.L., Forrin, B. & Hodder, S.L., (1999). Inspection Time and Intelligence: Practice, strategies, and attention. Intelligence, 27, 111–129.] suggest task consistency may underlie this shared variance. One possibility is that performance consistency reflects attentional mechanisms, as previous research has shown relationships between attentional control and cognitive performance. In study 1, participants were administered the Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices and performed an alternative version of the IT task to measure individual trial-by-trial consistency expressed as the standard deviation of IT (ITSD). The alternative procedure yielded IT–IQ correlations similar to those obtained in previous studies and ITSD accounted for the IT–IQ variance. A second experiment tested whether ITSD measures attentional control, as participants simultaneously performed the IT task and an attention-demanding verbalization task. Under these conditions, high IQ participants performed worse on IT. These results suggest IT performance may reflect individual differences in attentional control and that this variable may account for the variance shared between IT and IQ.

OBJECTIVES:We investigated whether context or different speech rates could improve older adult performance on identification of synthetically generated words.BACKGROUND:Synthetic speech systems can potentially improve the daily functioning of older adults. However, research must determine whether older adults can effectively implement current text-to-speech technologies, which few studies have examined. Older adults' sensory and cognitive declines may cause difficulties in identifying words in synthetic speech.METHODS:Ninety-six participants (young, middle-aged, and older adults) identified auditory monosyllabic words (half natural, half synthetic) presented in isolation or at the ends of sentences. Participants heard speech at either normal or slower rates.RESULTS:We found an interaction of age, context, and voice type and that slower speech rates worsened performance for all groups. Contrasts revealed that context reduced age differences, though only for natural speech. Hearing acuity was highly correlated with age and fully accounts for the interaction.CONCLUSIONS:Context improves performance for everyone in natural speech. However, whereas context improves performance for synthetic speech, it does not differentially reduce the age impairment for older adults. Slower speed generally impairs everyone's performance compared with the normal rate.APPLICATIONS:Systems using synthetic speech should avoid presenting words in isolation, and rich contextual support should be consistently adopted. Synthetic speech fidelity must be improved significantly before becoming truly useful for older adult populations.

Performance on abstract unfamiliar tasks used to measure intelligence has not been found to correlate with individual differences in highly skilled and expert performance. Given that cognitive and neural structures and regions mediating performance change as skill increases, the structures highlighted by parieto-frontal integration theory are unlikely to account for individual differences in skilled cognitive achievement in everyday life.

The authors examined longitudinal change in chess skill using a multilevel model analysis of a large database of active, elite chess players (N = 5,011). Parameters estimated from quadratic growth curves indicated that the age of peak performance occurs later in life than originally proposed and that this peak is independent of initial skill level. The findings are also consistent with the hypothesis that aging is slightly kinder to the initially more able, who show milder decline past their peak. Higher tournament activity levels predicted higher ratings overall and interacted with age in the initially more able sample, suggesting that activity had smaller effects on rating for older adults. The authors discuss implications of these findings for lifetime changes in skilled performance.

Applied psychologists have long been interested in examining expert performance in complex cognitive domains. In the present article, we report the results from a study of expert cognitive skill in which elements from two historically distinct research paradigms are incorporated -- the individual differences tradition and the expert-performance approach. Forty tournament-rated SCRABBLE players (20 elite, 20 average) and 40 unrated novice players completed a battery of domain-representative laboratory tasks and standardized verbal ability tests. The analyses revealed that elite- and average-level rated players only significantly differed from each other on tasks representative of SCRABBLE performance. Furthermore, domain-relevant practice mediated the effects of SCRABBLE tournament ratings on representative task performance, suggesting that SCRABBLE players can acquire some of the knowledge necessary for success at the highest levels of competition by engaging in activities deliberately designed to maximize adaptation to SCRABBLE-specific task constraints. We discuss the potential importance of our results in the context of continuing efforts to capture and explain superior performance across intellectual domains.

In our target paper we approached the issues of gifts and innate talents a little differently; in contrast to earlier reviews we turned away from definitions and global theories and focused instead on the empirical evidence for giftedness meeting the standards of laboratory science, namely that the performance associated with a gift or talent is reproducibly superior and objectively measured. We then surveyed all available domains for evidence and focused, in particular, on performance that allegedly could not be explained in terms of acquired skills and adaptations in the context of the expert performance framework. We argued that this approach would help us and other scientists make progress in identifying the verifiable, reproducible evidence for any innate gifts that may be necessary for achieving elite and expert levels of performance. Once identified, the associated phenomena could then be replicated and examined in more detail to develop complete accounts in terms of gifted individuals’ unique genetic endowment, the associated unique genes, and their expression during development leading to the observable phenotypes. We were delighted to receive so many commentaries from many of the authors that we had cited in our target paper. Several commentators (Baker, BeghettoKaufman, Coleman, Freeman, Kaufman, Runco, Subotnik-Jarvin-Rayhack, Ziegler) were kind enough to compliment us on our target paper’s scope and depth of review, even though many expressed disagreements with some of our views and ideas.

Giftedness researchers have long debated whether there is empirical evidence to support a distinction between giftedness and attained level of achievement. In this paper we propose a general theoretical framework that establishes scientific criteria for acceptable evidence of superior reproducible performance, which any theory of exceptional performance must explain. We review evidence for superior reproducible performance, generally emerging only after extended periods of deliberate practice that result in subsequent physiological adaptations and complex cognitive mechanisms. We also apply this framework to examine proposed evidence for innate talents. With the exception of fixed genetic factors determining body size and height, we were unable to find evidence for innate constraints to the attainment of elite achievement for healthy individuals.

Objectives: The goal of this study was to determine whether older adults are placed at a unique disadvantage in identifying emotions at small image sizes. Background: Technologies relevant to older adults often display small images, though no studies have examined whether these systems are usable for this population. Given the importance of successful emotional processing, we draw on research showing age-related difficulties in processing negative emotions to examine older adults' performance on images with reduced sizes. Methods: Sixty participants, 20 in each age group, were shown the names of emotions, followed by a facial expression, and were asked to indicate as rapidly as possible if they matched. Results: For response time we found an interaction of age and window size, showing that older adults, unlike younger adults, are slower with small sizes than with large sizes. For accuracy, we found an interaction of age and emotion, indicating that older adults are less accurate in the perception of fearful, sad, and surprised stimuli. Conclusions: Only older adults are disadvantaged by smaller images. Also, interactions of age and emotion reflect older adults' difficulty processing negative emotions. Applications: Our results have implications for the design of videoconferencing technology and mobile systems and extend previous research on aging and emotion.

Age-related declines in cognitive abilities can sometimes be remedied for working memory intensive tasks by providing what Craik (1986) termed “environmental support,” for instance, using external memory cues to alleviate normal memory retrieval demands. We investigated a way-finding task that requires serial recall, a particularly challenging memory task for older adults. We compared videoconference versus voice-only guided presentation of routes to younger and older adults. Participants viewed or did not view maps containing the to-be-learned routes. Additionally, participants were allowed to take notes to simulate real-world situations more closely for half of the trials. Analyses indicate an interaction of age, notes, and map presentation at recall, suggesting environmental support from videoconferencing reduces the advantage of note taking for older adults. Videoconferencing can be a particularly effective presentation medium for older adults with respect to memory-intensive everyday tasks.

Traditional conceptions of giftedness assume that only talented individuals possess the necessary gifts required to reach the highest levels of performance. This article describes an alternative view that expert performance results from acquired cognitive and physiological adaptations due to extended deliberate practice. A review of evidence, such as historical increases in performance, the requirement of years of daily deliberate practice, and structural changes in the mediating mechanisms, questions the existence of individual differences that impose innate limits on performance attainable with deliberate practice. The proposed framework describes how the processes mediating normal development of ability and everyday skill acquisition differ from the extended acquisition of reproducibly superior (expert) performance and how perceived "giftedness" gives children access to superior training resources, resulting in developmental advantages.

Part-Set Cuing: A Connectionist Approach to Strategy Disruption Edward T. Cokely (cokely@psy.fsu.edu) Department of Psychology, Florida State University Tallahassee, FL 32306 Roy W. Roring (roring@psy.fsu.edu) Department of Psychology, Florida State University Tallahassee, FL 32306 Part-Set Cuing Experiment 2: Simulation Results In a part-set cuing paradigm, when part of a previously studied list of words is provided as a memory aid, a reliable and robust impairment of the non-cued list items results. Since its discovery (Slamecka, 1968; as cited in Nickerson, 1984), this paradoxical phenomenon has been characterized as a persisting enigma in memory research (Nickerson, 1984), of both theoretical and practical concern. One leading informal model, the strategy disruption interpretation (Basden & Basden, 1995), suggests that the part-set cuing impairment results because one’s retrieval strategy is changed and differs from the original encoding strategy, following the presentation of cues. The strategy disruption account is thoroughly supported by empirical evidence; however, it has been criticized as theoretically vague and poorly defined. In contrast, the other leading account, a formal model using SAM (Raaijmaker & Shiffrin, 1981), while precise, has been criticized as overly defined, theoretically inconsistent, and unable to account for the full range of findings (Roediger & Neely, 1982). In an attempt to more precisely identify and extend the strategy disruption interpretation, we examine and compare both neural network simulations and human experiments in a part-set cuing paradigm. The Neural Network The artificial neural network used was a fully-connected, auto-associative, three-layer perceptron, using a backpropagation algorithm with a learning rate set to 0.1. The network used 15 input and 15 output nodes with a bias, 10 hidden, and 10 context units. The context layer used a 1 to 1 association from hidden units to context units and was fully connected from context to hidden units. Experiment 1: Human Results A within-participant (N=24) design was used and counterbalanced for list-order, list-cue-order, and randomized part-set cuing. A typical and robust part-set cuing impairment was observed for cued (M=.35) verses non-cued (M=.40) items, F (1,23) = 4.99, p < .05. A within-simulated-participant (N=24) part-set cuing design was used and counterbalanced for list-order and list-cue- order, with randomized part-set cues. Output vector error served as the dependent variable and was summed and analyzed for cued and non-cued states. A typical and robust part-set cuing impairment was observed, F (1, 23) = 24.00, p < .05, without evidence of catastrophic interference. Conclusion & Discussion The neural network was consistent with the observed human performance, providing a good fit across a number of analyses. The findings suggest that the neural network formalism is consistent with and may serve as an extension of the Basden and Basden strategy disruption account of part-set cuing. That is, following cuing, different study and activation patterns disrupt the subsequent process of recall. This disruption is caused by a change in the availability and accessibility of cued items, altering the retrieval process and thus the retrieval strategy. Although the experimental evidence is from a small set, results suggest that the neural network can provide an increasingly precise mechanistic account of part-set cuing impairment that is consistent with the leading informal theoretical account. Future simulations should attempt to replicate key findings including part-set cuing facilitation and category-cuing impairment. References Basden, D. R., & Basden, B. H. (1995). Some tests of the strategy disruption interpretation of part-list cuing inhibition. Journal of Experimental Psycholgoy: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21, 1656-1669. Nickerson, R. S. (1984). Retrieval inhibition from part-set cuing: A persisting enigma in memory research. Memory and Cognition, 12, 531-552. Raaijmakers, G.W., & Shiffrin, R. M. (1981). Search of associative memory. Psychological Review, 88, 93-134. Roediger III, H. L., & Neely, J. H. (1982). Retrieval blocks in episodic and semantic memory. Canadian Journal of Psychology, 36, 213-242.