Volume 1, Issue 2

Much progress has been made in cognitive psychology and neuroscience in understanding the mechanisms underpinning expert behavior. Concurrently, expertise has been extensively studied in several other disciplines; in particular, sociology, philosophy, and artificial intelligence. However, there has been relatively little communication between these disciplines. This is regrettable, as many contradictions between the disciplines have been ignored and many opportunities for cross-fertilization missed. For example, psychology has focused on performance-based expertise and emphasized the remarkable feats displayed by experts, while sociology has directed its attention to the shortcomings of reputation-based experts. It is proposed that unifying forces between disciplines is the way forward for making progress in our understanding of expertise.

We focus here on child prodigies to make the case that all high-level achievement—whether we call this giftedness or expertise—depends in part on genetic potential. Of course, high achievement also requires hard work (some call this “deliberate practice”), but hard work depends on two factors: the inborn ability to make progress (without this, children are likely to be frustrated and give up) and strong intrinsic motivation, which we call a rage to master. High ability is typically (but not always) coupled with a rage to master, and this combination leads to the extraordinary achievements of child prodigies. We provide examples from the domains of reading, number, drawing, and music to support our position that high ability makes itself known prior to any deliberate practice. We conclude by considering the vexed relationship between being a child prodigy and becoming a domain creator in adulthood.

Although it is well established that, on average, psychotherapy is effective, outcomes have remained flat for more than five decades. Since the 1990s, the effort to identify “empirically supported treatment” approaches has done little to alter this fact. Even more sobering, studies either fail to show therapists improve with specialized training or their outcomes steadily decline with time and experience. The aim of this paper is to illuminate how findings from the literature on expertise and expert performance illuminate new paths for the field of psychotherapy. Results to date point to new possibilities for helping practitioners realize improvements in the quality and outcome of their work.

Sunday and Gauthier (2018) raise a number of interesting points about Young and Burton's (2018) revisionist opinion of expertise for recognizing face identity. We are happy to clarify and debate these matters by explaining further why we proposed independent criteria for expertise, how we see the roles of perceptual experience and the everyday demands of face recognition, why we agree that individual differences are important, why we don't accept the idea of a linear hierarchy of perceptual recognition difficulty from unfamiliar to familiar faces, and the relevance of things we can indeed see in unfamiliar faces.