Department of Psychology, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Box 1121, Edwardsville, IL 62026-1121, USA.
Psychol Sci. 2010 Jul;21(7):914-9. doi: 10.1177/0956797610373933. Epub 2010 Jun 9.
Deliberate practice-that is, engagement in activities specifically designed to improve performance in a domain-is strongly predictive of performance in domains such as music and sports. It has even been suggested that deliberate practice is sufficient to account for expert performance. Less clear is whether basic abilities, such as working memory capacity (WMC), add to the prediction of expert performance, above and beyond deliberate practice. In evaluating participants having a wide range of piano-playing skill (novice to expert), we found that deliberate practice accounted for nearly half of the total variance in piano sight-reading performance. However, there was an incremental positive effect of WMC, and there was no evidence that deliberate practice reduced this effect. Evidence indicates that WMC is highly general, stable, and heritable, and thus our results call into question the view that expert performance is solely a reflection of deliberate practice.
刻意练习——即专门设计的活动，以提高特定领域的表现——强烈预测音乐和运动等领域的表现。甚至有人认为，刻意练习足以解释专家表现。不太清楚的是，基本能力，如工作记忆容量（WMC），是否在刻意练习之外，对专家表现的预测有额外的贡献。在评估具有广泛钢琴演奏技能（新手到专家）的参与者时，我们发现刻意练习几乎占钢琴视奏表现总方差的一半。然而，WMC 有一个递增的积极影响，而且没有证据表明刻意练习会降低这种影响。证据表明 WMC 具有高度的普遍性、稳定性和遗传性，因此我们的结果质疑了专家表现仅仅是刻意练习的反映这一观点。
