The expert-performance approach guided the collection of survey data on the developmental history of elite professional ballet dancers from three different countries/cultures (USA, Mexico, and Russia). The level of ballet expertise attained by age 18 was found to be uniquely predicted by only two factors, namely the total number of accumulated…

The authors are pleased with commentators' willingness to respond to their target article's challenge to identify observable reproducible phenomena that could be widely accepted as strong scientific evidence for innate talent. In this reply, the authors have organized the ideas in the commentaries into three general categories, namely the…

Giftedness researchers have long debated whether there is empirical evidence to support a distinction between giftedness and attained level of achievement. In this paper we propose a general theoretical framework that establishes scientific criteria for acceptable evidence of superior reproducible performance, which any theory of exceptional…