Testing the Deliberate Practice Theory: Does Practice Reduce the Heritability of Musical Expertise?

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

SUBMITTER: Mosing MA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11433073 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature