Traditional research into giftedness and expertise assumes that the key factors to develop outstanding achievements are early performance (e.g., in a school subject, sport, or in concerts) and corresponding abilities (e.g., intelligence, motor skills, musicality) along with many years of intensive training in a discipline. Accordingly, talent programs typically aim to select the top-performing youth and then seek to further accelerate their performance through intensive discipline-specific training.

However, this is apparently not the ideal way to promote young talent, as a team led by Arne Güllich, professor of sports science at RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau, has recently discovered.

The work is published in the journal Science.