players? Of course, the “hardware” answer to this question is that we are not born with
sufficient athletic talent to do so. But there is another possibility. Perhaps we simply do
not practise hard enough, long enough or well enough to fulfil our potential. This
controversial “nurturist” possibility raises an intriguing issue. How important is practice
in the development of expertise in any field?
Surprisingly, it is only in the past decade that this question has begun to receive
sustained empirical attention in psychology. Nevertheless, several stage theories have
been developed to account for the development of expertise in young performers in
different fields (e.g., see Bloom, 1985; Dreyfus, 1997). Of these approaches, the work of
Ericsson has generated the greatest volume of research in recent years.
According to Ericsson and his colleagues (Ericsson et al., 1993; Ericsson and Lehman,
1996), innate talent is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the development of
expertise in a given domain. Instead, top-level performance is believed to be an acquired
skill which is attributable largely to the quantity and quality of the performer’s practice
schedule (where “practice” is understood as any exercise that is designed to fulfil the goal
of improving the person’s performance). This claim about the primacy of practice is
based on two main sources of evidence—first, research which highlights the “plasticity”
or amenability of many cognitive characteristics to practice effects, and second, studies
on the practice habits of elite musicians. Let us now consider each of these two strands of
evidence in more detail.
For a long time, it was assumed that many of our mental limitations (e.g., the fact that
our short-term memory is very brief and fragile) were caused by flaws in the design of
our brain. For example, early cognitive research (see details in Matlin, 2002) showed that
the average person’s short-term memory span is restricted to between seven and nine
units of information—which probably explains why we find it difficult to remember
people’s mobile phone numbers. However, this structural limitation principle was
challenged by Chase and Ericsson (1981) who showed that with between 200 and 400
hours of practice, a person could be trained to remember up to 80 randomly presented
digits. Details of this remarkable case study are presented in Box 6.6.
Box 6.6 How practice can improve your memoryOne of the oldest tasks in experimental psychology is the memory-span test This test
requires people to remember a number of digits (e.g., 1, 9, 6, 6, 2, 0, 0, 1) in the precise
sequence in which they were presented. Early research (e.g., see details in Matlin, 2002)
showed that most people can remember between seven and nine such digits—hence the
estimation of the apparent limit on our short-term memory span. But what if one were
trained to group or chunk these digits together so that they could be transformed into
meaningful units? For example, the previous digit sequence could be segmented into two
composite units rather than eight separate digits (e.g., “1966” or the year that England
won the World Cup and “2001” or the title of a famous science-fiction film directed by
Stanley Kubrick). Using this chunking approach, Chase and Ericsson (1981) trained a
volunteer (whose original memory-span was about the average of seven units) over 200
practice sessions spanning several months to achieve a remarkable memory-span
whereby he could recall accurately over80 digits presented randomly! How was this feat
What lies beneath the surface? Investigating expertise in sport 173