individuals stems from innate sources. The application of this argument to
music has focused on historical accounts of famous prodigies who appeared
to be obsessed with sound during infancy, as well as interview studies with the
parents of contemporary musical prodigies who report stories of children
who began to sing spontaneously or played with musical toys for hours at a
time without prompting (Feldman, 1986; Winner & Martino, 1993).
Some have dismissed these anecdotes as unreliable on the grounds that ret-
rospective accounts of childhood events or second-hand reports of skilled
performance and its antecedents are particularly vulnerable to confirmation
bias and other measurement distortions (Ericsson & Faivre, 1988; Howe,
1990). In some cases, it appears that some accounts of the precocious behav-
iors of musical and other artistic prodigies may be outright fabrications (see
Ericsson & Charness, 1994). However, even if this type of data were admitted
as a reliable source of evidence, one would also need to account for the results
of other interview studies in which high-achieving music students and elite
adult musicians did not show evidence of exceptional promise at early ages
and were not exceptionally motivated to practice at the start of training
(Sloboda & Howe, 1991; Sosniak, 1985). Skeptics may counter that perhaps
the right environmental triggers or catalysts were simply not presented to the
participants of these studies in order to allow their exceptional abilities and
internal motivation to emerge earlier in development (Gagne, 1993). Thus,
long-lasting motivational drives in musically precocious or talented children
may need to be set in motion by some kind of early crystallizing experience
(Freeman, 1999; Walters & Gardner, 1986) in which his or her attention be-
comes transfixed on music due to some salient quality or feature of a specific
event and its connection with biological dispositions related to high musical
intelligence (Gardner, 1983). In fact, Walters and Gardner (1986) went so far
as to suggest that talent actually causes motivation, such that an individual
who already possesses extraordinary intellectual powers in a particular do-
main is more likely to be interested in and curious about domain-relevant
problems and challenges.
We have several reasons for being skeptical of this claim. First, several
studies of musical precocity, giftedness, or talent make reference to the excep-
tionally supportive parents and the exceptional opportunities for learning
that they begin to provide prior to the emergence of exceptional performance
(Sloboda & Howe, 1991; see also Howe et al., 1998). This raises the question
regarding whether or not some form of behavioral reinforcement, either in-
tentional or unintentional, might account for at least some of the precocious
musical behaviors that are frequently attributed to innate biological sources.
Thus, we might imagine a situation in which a child accidentally makes a
rhythmic noise in the presence of a parent, who subsequently gives a verbal
prompt or perhaps a material reward for child’s behavior, thus encouraging
the child to repeat it. This kind of scenario may be very difficult to capture in
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