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Achievement in different domains, such as academics, music, or visual arts, plays a central role in all modern societies. Different psychological models aim to describe and explain achievement and its development in different domains. However, there remains a need for a framework that guides empirical research within and across different domains. With the talent-development-in-achievement-domains (TAD) framework, we provide a general talent-development framework applicable to a wide range of achievement domains. The overarching aim of this framework is to support empirical research by focusing on measurable psychological constructs and their meaning at different levels of talent development. Furthermore, the TAD framework can be used for constructing domain-specific talent-development models. With examples for the application of the TAD framework to the domains of mathematics, music, and visual arts, the review provided supports the suitability of the TAD framework for domain-specific model construction and indicates numerous research gaps and open questions that should be addressed in future research.

This commentary situates Friedman et al. (2024) – and by extension, Clemente et al. (2021) – within a broader research context. Both papers raise important issues, but neither study’s result can be considered definitive. The operationalization and assessment of aesthetic constructs across many investigations should reflect the inherent diversity of human artmaking, yielding a structured sense of the conditions under which modality-specific versus modality-general representations predominate in aesthetic or evaluative cognition. Additionally, I note that this research enterprise touches on two sets of issues, which are simultaneously central to an understanding of the nature of human artistry, yet which remain under-represented in contemporary research. One concerns the murky evolutionary origin of our human artistic capacity, including the role of cross-modal processing and its role in aesthetic cognition. The second involves the first-person deployment of this capacity in creative problem solving, rather than in a merely receptive mode. Both speak to the importance of understanding inherent structure and constraints on human aesthetics and creativity.

The characterization and measurement of complexity, even in a stripped-down context like sequences of digits, has long been a significant conceptual challenge (Pagels, 1988) - not to mention the added psychological layers and dimensions when considering what complexity means in the context of great works of art, music, or literature. In any case, the enterprise of assessing and relating aesthetic sensitivity to factors like complexity, to explore the extent to which aesthetic and evaluative judgments operate in a modality-specific or modality-general way, is innovative and provocative. [...]any evidence bearing on the question of cross-modality has implications for how we understand the broader nature of human aesthetic processing - in terms of its origins, limitations, applications, and ultimate prospects. The phylogenetic origin of the arts has spawned a significant scholarly literature, often highlighting the question of what evolutionary mechanism(s) gave rise to our aesthetic capacity: possibilities include direct Darwinian natural selection, sexual selection, or the arts arising as a byproduct of other selected-for adaptations; alternatively, the arts may have cultural rather than biological roots (Dissanayake, 2007; Kozbelt, 2020, 2021; Pinker, 2002). Yet another model posits the opposite: rather than distinct underlying sensory modalities initially giving rise to different domains of aesthetic activity - like visual art or music or storytelling or dance - Brown (2022) has suggested that the arts had a multi-modal and multi-media origin, integrated and embodied and performative, with the emergence of other domain-specific forms of art being later developments. [...]the rejoining of these strands - in contemporary multimedia installations, film, or other 'total works of art' (Brown & Dissanayake, 2018) - marks a return to a human default aesthetic.) Brown further argued that artistic expression in domains like theater or opera or dance frequently operates in a cross-modal fashion, noting commonalities between audition and vision in parameters like tempo, articulation, amplitude (loudness or brightness), and movement shape (in melodies or physical movement) - just the kinds of abstracted, modality-general labels like 'balance' or 'symmetry' considered by Clemente et al.

We discuss how the psycho-historical framework can be profitably applied to artistic production, facilitating a synthesis of perception-based and knowledge-based perspectives on realistic observational drawing. We note that artists' technical knowledge itself constitutes a major component of an artwork's historical context, and that links between artistic practice and psychological theory may yet yield conclusions in line with universalist perspectives.

Factors predicting the aesthetic success and possible career-long improvement in quality of 610 musical compositions by W.A. Mozart were examined. Aesthetic success was measured by counts of available recordings and aesthetic significance ratings of each work. In Study 1, a work’s year of composition, duration, and genre were found to be significant predictors of aesthetic success. Concurrent productivity was not a stable predictor. In Study 2, the quality of works judged as masterpieces as well as the proportion of masterpiece-level music composed each year were found to increase over time, even during Mozart’s maturity. Improvement mainly occurred in large-scale compositions: sonata form instrumental works, operas, and choral works. The results suggest Mozart became more creative and perspicacious as his career progressed, even after the onset of compositional maturity.

In free and open source software (FOSS), computer code is made freely accessible and can be modified by anyone. It is a creative domain with many unique features; the FOSS mode of creativity has also influenced many aspects of contemporary cultural production. In this article we identify a number of fundamental but unresolved general issues in the study of creativity, then examine the potential for the study of FOSS to inform these topics. Archival studies of the genesis of FOSS projects, coupled with laboratory studies detailing the psychological processes involved in software creation, can provide converging evidence on the nature of creativity in software design. Such a research program has broad implications both for theories of creativity and for real-world innovation in software and other forms of digital cultural production.

This chapter discusses the preliminary synthesis, linking quantitatively documented variability in composers' career trajectories with aspects of their working methods, evaluative processes and judgement criteria. It frequently uses the value-laden terminology, referring to the 'greatest' composers or 'eminent' composers and 'masterwork' in music history. While some may question this practice, quantitative assessments of the relative impact of notable creators and notable compositions on music history show large individual differences and extremely high internal consistency across measures, amply justifying such language. The creator-audience dynamic in extreme conceptual innovation, in which novelty is prioritised over virtually every other quality, including basic perceptual and communicative capacities, can lead to an ever-increasing gulf between the creator and the audience. The application of David W. Galenson's creator typology to classical composers is relatively straightforward and can be subsumed into mainstream creativity theories in terms of a differential emphasis on ideation vs elaboration.

Art historian Ernst Gombrich argued that learning to create convincing realistic depictions is a difficult, incremental process requiring the invention of numerous specific techniques to solve its many problems. Gombrich's argument is elaborated here in a historical review of the evolution of realistic depiction in ancient Greek vase painting, Italian Renaissance painting and contemporary computer-generated imagery (CGI) in video games. The order in which many problems of realism were solved in the three trajectories is strikingly similar, suggesting a common psychological explanation.