Exceptional performers play a major role in driving innovation and tackling some of the world's most urgent challenges. Because of this, societies have a strong stake in understanding how top-level talent develops. A new review published in the journal Science argues that many long standing approaches to gifted education and talent development rest on flawed assumptions. For the first time, an international and interdisciplinary research team has brought together evidence on how world-class performers emerge in science, classical music, chess, and sports.

For decades, research on giftedness and expertise has followed a familiar model. Outstanding achievement was thought to depend on strong early performance, such as excelling in school subjects, sports, or concerts, combined with specific abilities like intelligence, physical coordination, or musical talent. These traits were believed to need years of intense, discipline-focused training to produce elite results. As a result, many talent programs concentrate on identifying the top young performers early and pushing them to specialize quickly.

According to new findings led by Arne Güllich, professor of sports science at RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau, this approach may not be the most effective way to nurture future high achievers.

Why Earlier Research Missed the Full Picture

Until recently, most studies of giftedness focused on young or sub-elite performers. These groups included school and college students, youth athletes, young chess players, and musicians training at conservatories. However, evidence drawn from adult world-class athletes has begun to challenge conclusions based on these earlier samples.

"Traditional research into giftedness and expertise did not sufficiently consider the question of how world-class performers at peak performance age developed in their early years," Arne Güllich explains. The goal of the new Review was to address this gap by examining how elite performers actually progressed over time.

To do this, Güllich worked with an international research team that included Michael Barth, assistant professor of sports economics at the University of Innsbruck, D. Zach Hambrick, professor of psychology at Michigan State University, and Brooke N. Macnamara, professor of psychology at Purdue University. Their findings are now published in Science.

Pooling Evidence Across Fields

The researchers reexamined large datasets from many previous studies, analyzing the developmental histories of 34,839 top-level performers from around the world. The group included Nobel Prize winners in the sciences, Olympic medalists, elite chess players, and leading classical music composers. This effort made it possible, for the first time, to compare how world-class performers develop across very different disciplines.