Can humans get arbitrarily capable reinforcement learning agents to do their bidding? Or will sufficiently capable RL agents always find ways to bypass their intended objectives by shortcutting their reward signal? This question impacts how far RL can be scaled, and whether alternative paradigms must be developed in order to build safe artificial general intelligence. In this paper, we study when an RL agent has an instrumental goal to tamper with its reward process, and describe design (...) principles that prevent instrumental goals for two different types of reward tampering. Combined, the design principles can prevent reward tampering from being an instrumental goal. The analysis benefits from causal influence diagrams to provide intuitive yet precise formalizations. (shrink)

Self-relevance has been demonstrated to impair instrumental learning. Compared to unfamiliar symbols associated with a friend, analogous stimuli linked with the self are learned more slowly. What is not yet understood, however, is whether this effect extends beyond arbitrary stimuli to material with intrinsically meaningful properties. Take, for example, stimulus valence an established moderator of self-bias. Does the desirability of to-be-learned material influence self-learning? Here, in conjunction with computational modelling (i.e. Reinforcement Learning Drift Diffusion Model analysis), (...) a probabilistic selection task was used to establish if and how stimulus valence (i.e. desirable/undesirable posters) impacts the acquisition of knowledge relating to object-ownership (i.e. owned-by-self vs. owned-by-friend). Several interesting results were observed. First, undesirable posters were learned more rapidly for self compared to friend, an effect that was reversed for desirable posters. Second, learning rates were accompanied by associated differences in reward sensitivity toward desirable and undesirable choice selections as a function of ownership. Third, decisional caution was greater for self-relevant (vs. friend relevant) responses. Collectively, these findings inform understanding of self-function and how valence and stimulus relevance mutually influence probabilistic learning. (shrink)

BackgroundOne of the preferences working in the Generation Z is based on their motivational work values. The relevance of job choices with the work values will contribute to student career planning. The work value instrument among generations is one of the popular instruments used to measure final year students' work value, yet few studies of the psychometric properties of non-English language versions of this instrument. This study's objectives were to adapt a questionnaire of work value in Indonesian final year university (...) students.MethodsThe number of participants in this study was 316 students in Indonesia, comprised of final year students from various majors who were selected by quota sampling. The instrument consisted of 5 dimensions of value, including leisure, extrinsic rewards, intrinsic rewards, altruistic rewards, and social rewards. The reliability analysis was performed using McDonald's Omega, the evidence of validity was obtained from test content, internal structure through confirmatory factor analysis, and evidence-based in relation to other variable has conducted the correlation between work value and career development learning using the Pearson's correlation coefficient.ResultsThe results showed that the work values instrument had good psychometric properties, including good reliability, good content validity, and internal structure. In CFA, the two-factor structure showed satisfactory model fit. Moreover, the correlation of work value with career development learning builds stronger validity evidence on this instrument.ConclusionThe adapted instrument can be used practically to identify work value preferences of final year students to help them choose a work preference and setup the career planning before graduating. The result could be of interest for the researcher in work value, motivational work, and career areas in higher education. To the best of our knowledge, there have been no reports about the adaptation of work value instruments in Indonesian final year university students. (shrink)

Across species, animals have an intrinsic drive to approach appetitive stimuli and to withdraw from aversive stimuli. In affective science, influential theories of emotion link positive affect with strengthened behavioural approach and negative affect with avoidance. Based on these theories, we predicted that individuals’ positive and negative affect levels should particularly influence their behaviour when innate Pavlovian approach/avoidance tendencies conflict with learned instrumental behaviours. Here, across two experiments – exploratory Experiment 1 (N = 91) and a preregistered confirmatory Experiment (...) 2 (N = 335) – we assessed how induced positive and negative affect influenced Pavlovian-instrumental interactions in a reward/punishment Go/No-Go task. Contrary to our hypotheses, we found no evidence for a main effect of positive/negative affect on either approach/avoidance behaviour or Pavlovian-instrumental interactions. However, we did find evidence that the effects of induced affect on behaviour were moderated by individual differences in self-reported behavioural inhibition and gender. Exploratory computational modelling analyses explained these demographic moderating effects as arising from positive correlations between demographic factors and individual differences in the strength of Pavlovian-instrumental interactions. These findings serve to sharpen our understanding of the effects of positive and negative affect on instrumental behaviour. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The list of proposed addictions has recently grown to include television, videogames, shopping, day trading, kleptomania, and use of the Internet. These activities share with a more established entry, gambling, the property that they require no delivery of a biological stimulus that might be thought to unlock a hardwired brain process. I propose a framework for analyzing that class of incentives that do not depend on the prediction of physically privileged environmental events: people have a great capacity to coin (...) endogenous reward; we learn to cultivate it, and, where it is entrapping, to minimize it, by managing internally generated appetites for it. The basic method of cultivating endogenous reward is to learn cues that predict when best to harvest the reward that has been made possible by the growth of these appetites. This hedonic management occurs in the same motivational marketplace as the instrumental planning that seeks environmental goods in the conventional manner, and presumably obeys the same laws of temporal difference learning; but these laws are no longer limiting. Furthermore, instrumental contingencies often provide the most productive structure for hedonic management as well, for reasons that I discuss; but the needs of hedonic management create incentives both to pursue instrumental goals in a suboptimal manner and to avoid noticing how the hedonic incentive affects this pursuit. The result is the apparent irrationality that is often observed in process addictions. (shrink)

People become addicted in different ways, and they respond differently to different interventions. There may nevertheless be a core neural pathology responsible for all distinctively addictive suboptimal behavioral habits. In particular, timing models of reward learning suggest a hypothesis according to which all addiction involves neuroadaptation that attenuates serotonergic inhibition of a mesolimbic dopamine system that has learned that cues for consumption of the addictive target are signals of a high-reward-rate environment.

There is growing consensus that reward plays an important role in the control of attention. Until recently, reward was thought to influence attention indirectly by modulating task-specific motivation and its effects on voluntary control over selection. Such an account was consistent with the goal-directed (endogenous) versus stimulus-driven (exogenous) framework that had long dominated the field of attention research. Now, a different perspective is emerging. Demonstrations that previously reward-associated stimuli can automatically capture attention even when physically inconspicuous and (...) task-irrelevant challenge previously held assumptions about attentional control. The idea that attentional selection can be value driven, reflecting a distinct and previously unrecognized control mechanism, has gained traction. Since these early demonstrations, the influence of reward learning on attention has rapidly become an area of intense investigation, sparking many new insights. The result is an emerging picture of how the reward system of the brain automatically biases information processing. Here, I review the progress that has been made in this area, synthesizing a wealth of recent evidence to provide an integrated, up-to-date account of value-driven attention and some of its broader implications. (shrink)

Where do values live in thought? A straightforward answer is that we (or our brains) make decisions using explicit value representations which are our values. Recent work applying reinforcement learning to decision-making and planning suggests that more specifically, we may represent both the instrumental expected value of actions as well as the intrinsic reward of outcomes. In this paper, I argue that identifying value with either of these representations is incomplete. For agents such as humans and other (...) animals, there is another place where reward can be located in thought: the division of the space of possibilities or ‘state space’. (shrink)

Religion can have an important influence in moral decision-making, and religious reminders may deter people from unethical behavior. Previous research indicated that religious contexts may increase prosocial behavior and reduce cheating. However, the perceptual-behavioral link between religious contexts and decision-making lacks thorough scientific understanding. This study adds to the current literature by testing the effects of purely audial religious symbols (instrumental music) on moral behavior across three different sites: Mauritius, the Czech Republic, and the USA. Participants were exposed to (...) one of three kinds of auditory stimuli (religious, secular, or white noise), and subsequently were given a chance to dishonestly report on solved mathematical equations in order to increase their monetary reward. The results showed cross-cultural differences in the effects of religious music on moral behavior, as well as a significant interaction between condition and religiosity across all sites, suggesting that religious participants were more influenced by the auditory religious stimuli than non-religious participants. We propose that religious music can function as a subtle cue associated with moral standards via cultural socialization and ritual participation. Such associative learning can charge music with specific meanings and create sacred cues that influence normative behavior. Our findings provide preliminary support for this view, which we hope further research will investigate more closely. (shrink)

An approach to emotion is described in which emotions are defined as states elicited by instrumental reinforcers, that is, by stimuli that are the goals for action. This leads to a theory of the evolutionary adaptive value of emotions, which is that different genes specify different goals in their own self-interest, and any actions can then be learned and performed by instrumental learning to obtain the goals. The brain mechanisms for emotion in brain regions such as the (...) orbitofrontal and anterior cingulate cortex provide a foundation for understanding the neural basis of emotion. Classically conditioned effects may modulate the actions initiated by this system. In addition to this instrumental learning system, some stimuli may elicit responses, for example approach, withdrawal, or fixed action patterns, but intervening states are not required for this type of adaptive response. In addition, a rational thought system involved in multistep planning can allow gene-specified goals to be deferred or avoided in order to achieve longer-term types of goals that may be more advantageous to the individual than to the genes. (shrink)

The issue whether psychopathic offenders are practically rational has attracted philosophical attention. The problem is relevant in theoretical discussions on moral psychology and in those concerning the appropriate social response to the crimes of these individuals. We argue that classical and current experiments concerning the instrumental learning in psychopaths cannot directly support the conclusion that they have impaired instrumental rationality, construed as the ability for transferring the motivation by means-ends reasoning. In fact, we defend the different claim (...) that these experiments appear to show that psychopaths in certain circumstances are not aware of the relevant means for their ends. Moreover, we suggest how further empirical research could help to settle the issue. (shrink)

Auditory-guided vocal learning is a mechanism that operates both in humans and other animal species making us capable to imitate arbitrary sounds. Both auditory memories and auditory feedback interact to guide vocal learning. This may explain why it is easier for humans to imitate the pitch of a human voice than the pitch of a synthesized sound. In this study, we compared the effects of two different feedback modalities in learning pitch-matching abilities using a synthesized pure tone (...) in 47 participants with no prior music experience. Participants were divided into three groups: a feedback group receiving real-time visual feedback of their pitch as well as knowledge of results; an equal-timbre group receiving additional auditory feedback of the target note with a similar timbre to the instrument being used ; and a control group practicing without any feedback or knowledge of results. An additional fourth group of violin experts performed the same task for comparative purposes. All groups were posteriorly evaluated in a transfer phase. Both experimental groups improved their intonation abilities with the synthesized sound after receiving feedback. Participants from the equal-timber group seemed as capable as the feedback group of producing the required pitch with the voice after listening to the human voice, but not with the violin. In addition, only participants receiving real-time visual feedback learned and retained in the transfer phase the mapping between the synthesized pitch and its correspondence with the produced vocal or violin pitch. It is suggested that both the effect of an objective external reward, together with the experience of exploring the pitch space with their instrument in an explicit manner, helped participants to understand how to control their pitch production, strengthening their schemas, and favoring retention. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Justifying the Arts:Drama and Intercultural EducationMike Fleming (bio)IntroductionFor teachers of arts subjects, questions about justification can be tiresome in the same way that contemporary aestheticians may feel fatigue about defining art.1 Providing justification can feel more like an exercise in rhetoric than theoretical enquiry, induced more by political necessity than intellectual challenge. If the value of the arts is not self-evident, it is difficult to advance arguments to convince (...) those who have no knowledge or affinity with them. Not that many educationists admit to falling into the latter category. As Eisner has said, nobody wants to be seen as a philistine.2 Yet to those with a deep commitment to the value of the arts in education and wider society, the arts are rarely thought to be taken as seriously as they should be.3 This paper will describe five approaches to the question of justifying the arts before examining the specific case of drama and intercultural education.Approaches to Justifying the Teaching of the ArtsFaced with questions of justification, providing a list of reasons for teaching the arts is one approach but not the only one. Instead, looking for broader categories of justification within possible lists (e.g., between art and entertainment, feeling and cognition) exposes differences of emphasis more easily. Exploration of the tension between such concepts as "creating" and "responding" may help get behind bland claims of the kind that the arts can "develop creativity." In this way, the relevance of aesthetic theory, which often centers on the tension between competing concepts, can be demonstrated more readily. Another approach to the question of justification is to reject the idea that the arts should serve instrumental goals at all by advancing an argument in favor of their intrinsic rewards. A fourth approach is to [End Page 54] question whether it is appropriate to seek justification for the arts as a generic concept, rather than looking instead at individual art forms; the benefits of dance may be different in certain respects from those of visual arts. Finally, a priori enquiry could be abandoned altogether in favor of seeing what teachers actually say about their reasons for teaching the arts. Each of these positions will be examined briefly.Mortimer includes physical education and personal and social education among the areas of benefit he attributes to the arts.4 Within five broad categories, he describes further subcategories, amounting to more than seventeen reasons for teaching the arts. He also claims that the arts are a way of developing life skills and attitudes that are transferable across the curriculum and are a way of contextualizing other learning. It is easy to sympathize with someone who is passionate about the arts and concerned that they should be seen as a "fundamental" not as a "frill," but such general claims do not always bring clarity or insight. It is difficult for example to see how poetry "encourages physical confidence in balance." A visit to a children's home may be more fruitful in "developing sensitivity to others." The benefit of "using imagination and creativity" (a catchall phrase that on its own says very little) may in practice find tension with other stated benefits such as "discriminating, selecting, editing." The latter concepts suggest a more constrained, skills-oriented form of teaching rather than an approach that encourages free flow of imagination. Long lists of justifications can obscure theoretical differences and from a tactical point of view in the political arena can appear overblown. They are well meant but not always helpful. Nor do they go far in explaining the deep importance of the arts in so many people's lives.The influential Gulbenkian report in the United Kingdom was wide-ranging in its claims but reinforced the idea of the arts as being an alternative to academic study and what it termed "logico-deductive thought."5 "Society," it argued, "needs and values more than academic abilities." In the 1980s, many writers were keen to free themselves from the influence of narrow theories of self-expression to embrace a wider discipline-based approach but continued to underplay the cognitive dimensions of work in art.6 Of course an emphasis... (shrink)

This article considers the motivations of teachers to pursue ongoing professional learning. During recent decades, the international policy context has been characterised by high-stakes accountability, but the implications of this agenda for teachers’ motivations toward professional learning remains under-explored. In this mixed methods study, combining a large teacher survey and in-depth teacher interviews, a new and significant concept of ‘instrumental motivation’ is generated to capture how high-stakes performance management policies damage the motivation of teachers to learn professionally. (...) This innovative approach, employing ordinal factor analysis and inductive/deductive hybrid thematic analysis inclusive of self-determination theory, reveals how the ‘instrumental motivation’ of teachers should be constrained and argues for the adoption of alternative motivational strategies to support effective professional learning in schools. (shrink)

The question, “Will science remain human?” expresses a worry that deep learning algorithms will replace scientists in making crucial judgments of classification and inference and that something crucial will be lost if that happens. Ever since the introduction of telescopes and microscopes humans have relied on technologies to “extend” beyond human sensory perception in acquiring scientific knowledge. In this paper I explore whether the ways in which new learning technologies “extend” beyond human cognitive aspects of science can be (...) treated instrumentally. I will consider the norms for determining the reliability of a detection instrument, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, in predicting models of protein atomic structure. Do the same norms that apply in that case be used to judge the reliability of Artificial Intelligence deep learning algorithms? (shrink)

We propose that human social learning is subject to a trade-off between the cost of performing a computation and the flexibility of its outputs. Viewing social learning through this lens sheds light on cases that seem to violate bifocal stance theory (BST) – such as high-fidelity imitation in instrumental action – and provides a mechanism by which causal insight can be bootstrapped from imitation of cultural practices.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Rethinking Music Education and Social Change by Alexandra Kertz-WelzelGraça MotaAlexandra Kertz-Welzel, Rethinking Music Education and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022)I began to read this book shortly after the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian troops. Amidst this most terrible and brutal context, reading and re-reading the book that Alexandra Kertz-Welzel offers was both a blessing and an intense exercise of food for thought. A blessing as (...) it drives our minds through a complex but nonetheless rewarding journey into the meanders of critical and ideal visions. An exercise of food for thought as she turns to the arts, philosophy, sociology, and political theory to construct an interdisciplinary, sustained story. While rethinking “the goals of music education in view of social change,”1 the introduction describes the purpose of the study and presents the author’s chosen theoretical pillars: Levitas’s concept of utopia, Georgina Born’s four planes of music’s sociality, David Hesmondalgh’s defense of aesthetic experience, and Martha Nussbaum’s concept of human flourishing. Furthermore, Kertz-Welzel aims to answer the question of what social change is in general but also, concerning music education, to critically consider the contribution that music education can make to social change. She proposes to redefine “the general goals of music education regarding its social and musical intentions, reuniting two dimensions which have been defined as opposite, but are in fact complementary regarding [End Page 99] politically and socially responsive music education and esthetic music education.”2 I will get back later to this last intention in the context of the author’s approach to the redefinition of music education. For now, I will begin with her proposed definition of music education as utopian theory and practice, in the context of the chosen title for this book.Rethinking Music Education and Social Change is a very appealing title not only because rethinking music education is a most pressing issue within the community of music educators but also because social change, in relationship with music, has been the object of research in numerous projects, claiming the transformative power of music. This is a theme I have been very much involved with, being the co-founder of the research platform, Social Impact of Making Music (SIMM),3 that aims to systematically investigate the possible social impacts of learning and playing music. Having said that, I found myself confronted with a book that sets in the middle of its focus to thoroughly investigate the concept of utopia in its multiple facets based on a complete discussion of its theoretical basis. In that context, the fact that the title of the book does not include utopia seemed to me rather puzzling, and I intend to come back to this at the end of this review.The author presents a comprehensive and updated review of the literature, its complexities and ambivalences in the relationship between the arts and social change as it appears and has evolved across time. This approach connects social change with activism, not forgetting the issue of dramatic social change that she exemplifies with the COVID-19 pandemic, and to which we can now sadly add the present state of war. Quoting Roxane de la Sablonniére (2017) and her four typologies of social change, Kertz-Welzel highlights the fact that in the last hundred years the pace of change has increased enormously, and “dramatic social change is a threat to cultural identity.”4The notion of the arts as a political instrument is thoroughly developed, and it should be acknowledged that the author takes here, as well as in other parts of the book, a courageous standpoint. She does not avoid critical or uncomfortable issues, one of them being the ambiguity of the arts. In her discussion on social distinction and identity construction, she cites Max Weber, Georg Simmel, and Pierre Bourdieu and argues that culture has indeed been used as a way of discrimination among people. She also points out the supposedly refined taste of higher social classes cultivated through access to various arts experiences, while others would be denied these experiences and therefore unable to develop their full artistic potential... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 122.3 (2001) 436-440 [Access article in PDF] M. L. West. Ancient Greek Music. 1992. Rpt., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. 424 pp. Paper, $28.00. For many years, lamentably, classical scholarship lacked a good book in English on the subject of Greek music as a whole, in spite of the indisputable prominence mousike had in Greek culture. M. L. West's book has filled that gap admirably. It (...) is indeed, as its publisher claims, "clear, comprehensive, and authoritative.""Clear." It is as clear as humanly possible, given the incredible complexity of the topic. Alhough it "presupposes no special knowledge of music," I fear the average unmusical student of Greek culture will eventually be totally lost in the jungles of Greek terminology or swept away in a torrent of unfamiliar names. A similar fate awaits the nonclassical student of musicology. But West has done a superhuman job of explaining everything step by step, and readers who are dedicated and careful will be rewarded with a solid understanding of a very complicated subject."Comprehensive." There can be no doubt that the book is comprehensive. It would be almost impossible to find a topic that has been overlooked, or an [End Page 436] ancient author that has been slighted or misrepresented. There are chapters on music in Greek life, the voice, stringed instruments, wind and percussion, rhythm and tempo, scales and modes, melody and form, theory, notation and pitch, musical documents, and a historical synthesis (in two parts). The book ends with an epilogue on the place of Greek music "between Europe and Asia."Modern scholarship has been thoroughly canvassed. I did, however, note one serious omission. West does not refer to F. Kuttner and J. M. Barbour, The Theory of Classical Greek Music (Musurgia Records 1955), in the text or bibliography. This book has a recording that allows one to hear the various phenomena discussed, affording an enormous improvement over trying to guess what an interval of, say, 63 cents sounds like."Authoritative." This bold claim is largely justified, especially in areas of special expertise, such as rhythm and ancient poetry. Controversial issues are not evaded; and, after a judicious and thorough laying out of the evidence, West comes down with a magisterial conclusion. He is usually right.The topic that most classicists are likely to be interested in, especially if they are studying Plato or Aristotle, is the "modes" (harmoniai), which are supposed to have such moral power that it is appropriate for a legislator to promote some and ban others. Readers will have to wait for chapter 6 to learn what West thinks about this issue.With his characteristic thoroughness, West begins with the anatomy of the octave, then the anatomy of the fourth into genera, enharmonic, chromatic, and diatonic. He mentions an earlier "pentatonic trichord," which evolves into a four-note unit with the small interval divided into smaller units (conventionally called "quarter tones"). He then discusses the "fine tuning" represented by the shades (chroai) treated by the Pythagorean, Aristoxenian, and Ptolemaic theorists. The last group makes a distinction between the tunings of theory and those of the actual tunings used in practice by (contemporary?) musicians.He then discusses "ambitus" or the region of the normal tessitura, interpreting (convincingly) "slack" as referring to pieces of music largely confined to the lower register and "tense" as the opposite. A discussion of the scales described by the fifth-century theorist Damon follows, but they are not "modal" (in the Western sense of scales differentiated by varying patterns of large and small intervals).There follows a thorough canvas of the ancient literature to expound references to the various harmoniai and their alleged moral and psychological effects. One truth emerges: the harmoniai were not "fixed and unchanging.... Old ones were discarded, new ones grew" (184). Unfortunately, however, he reaches no decision as to what, exactly, these harmoniai were.Even after the consolidation of the scales into the "perfect immutable system" (a master scale, which has various scales, tonoi, with the ethnic epithets Dorian, Phrygian, and so on), we cannot recognize what is meant in modern theory... (shrink)

While summer break presents educational and recreational opportunities for some students, students from depressed socioeconomic groups may face significant obstacles in the summer, including learning loss. In general, these students also lack access to a wide range of intrinsic and instrumental benefits attached to the study of philosophy. While there are currently existing philosophy programs, this contribution highlights the connections between summer experiences and the overall achievement gap, while identifying specific practices shown to yield successful summer programs. Philosophy (...) provides an impressive set of benefits, including academic skills and opportunities for personal growth and development. Incorporating best practices while focusing on the methods and content of philosophy should, therefore, yield particularly rewarding programs. Due to these benefits, summer philosophy programs should be researched, developed, and expanded. (shrink)

Do any nonhuman animals have hedonically valenced experiences not directly caused by stimuli in their current environment? Do they, like us humans, experience anticipated or previously experienced pains and pleasures as respectively painful and pleasurable? We review evidence from comparative neuroscience about hippocampus-dependent simulation in relation to this question. Hippocampal sharp-wave ripples and theta oscillations have been found to instantiate previous and anticipated experiences. These hippocampal activations coordinate with neural reward and fear centers as well as sensory and cortical (...) areas in ways that are associated with conscious episodic mental imagery in humans. Moreover, such hippocampal “re- and preplay” has been found to contribute to instrumental decision making, the learning of value representations, and the delay of rewards in rats. The functional and structural features of hippocampal simulation are highly conserved across mammals. This evidence makes it reasonable to assume that internally triggered experiences of hedonic valence (IHVs) are pervasive across (at least) all mammals. This conclusion has important welfare implications. Most prominently, IHVs act as a kind of “welfare multiplier” through which the welfare impacts of any given experience of pain or pleasure are increased through each future retrieval. However, IHVs also have practical implications for welfare assessment and cause prioritization. (shrink)

Musical prodigies reach exceptionally high levels of achievement before adolescence. Despite longstanding interest and fascination in musical prodigies, little is known about their psychological profile. Here we assess to what extent practice, intelligence, and personality make musical prodigies a distinct category of musician. Nineteen former or current musical prodigies were compared to 35 musicians with either an early or late start but similar amount of musical training, and 16 non-musicians. All completed a Wechsler IQ test, the Big Five Inventory, the (...) Autism Spectrum Quotient, the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire, the Dispositional Flow Scale, and a detailed history of their lifetime music practice. None of the psychological traits distinguished musical prodigies from control musicians or non-musicians except their propensity to report flow during practice. The other aspects that differentiated musical prodigies from their peers were the intensity of their practice before adolescence, and the source of their motivation when they began to play. Thus practice, by itself, does not make a prodigy. The results are compatible with multifactorial models of expertise, with prodigies lying at the high end of the continuum. In summary, prodigies are expected to present brain predispositions facilitating their success in learning an instrument, which could be amplified by their early and intense practice happening at a moment when brain plasticity is heightened. (shrink)