Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book Outliers popularized the idea that mastery requires practice. A lot of practice. According to the book’s often-repeated “ten-thousand-hour rule,” mastering a skill requires at least ten thousand hours of focused, deliberate practice. If you want to become a world-class musician, or chess player, or athlete, you can get there if you just keep grinding away for ten thousand hours.

The research study the rule was based on found that musicians-in-training could be classified based on their skill and estimated amount of practice. For example, by the time they were 20 years old, the best pianists had practiced for 10,000 hours, but amateurs had only practiced for 2,000 hours.

While the original research may not have been as neat and tidy as made out by Gladwell, the idea has stuck in the public imagination.

But where does that leave talent? Can anyone become a world-class performer with enough practice, or is talent part of the equation?

Some research suggests that talent may matter, after all, in mastering skills like piano or poker, and in skill mastery measured by educational and occupational achievement.

It may be the people with an initial talent and interest in a domain who are more likely to develop their skills through years and years of deliberate practice.

Are good drawers born or made?

In a recent article in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, researchers Devue and Grimshaw ask whether talent matters for drawing, too. And the specific type of talent the researchers focused on is the ability to process faces.

People who are experts at drawing portraits tend to have better face processing skills. But is this because both skills have been practiced over the years or because people who are better at face processing are more likely to go on to spend a lot of time drawing portraits?

Results are beginning to suggest it’s the latter. For example, art students who complete a year-long training course in live drawing don’t improve in their face processing skills.

In Devue and Grimshaw’s work, the researchers studied novices to understand how face processing skills relate to drawing when drawing expertise is taken out of the equation. If face processing matters for drawing, then novices who have good face processing skills should be better at drawing than novices who are not good at processing faces.

In three experiments, Devue and Grimshaw tested this prediction. The design of the three experiments was similar. Participants, who were novices in drawing, were asked to draw faces and houses based on reference photos. A separate group of participants then judged how faithful the drawings were.

For example, participants were asked to draw this face:

Here are examples of the most faithful drawings produced by the novices, along with the ratings given to them by a group of judges (1 = not at all faithful, 7 = very faithful):

And here are examples of the least faithful drawings:

Even though everyone in the study was a beginner, you can see that the quality of their drawings varied a lot!

Participants also completed tests to measure their ability to process faces. One test measured their ability to learn new faces and to recognize new examples of these faces, one test measured their perceptual discrimination of faces, and one measured long-term memory for faces. In addition, one test focused on object processing and served as an analogue for the face learning and recognition test: people were asked to learn new cars and to recognize new examples of these cars.

Face processing matters for drawing

In a nutshell, people’s drawing skills were found to be associated with their face processing skills. While the strength of the results varied across the three experiments, drawing faithfulness could be predicted by people’s ability to learn and recognize new faces, and to discriminate faces, but not by their long-term memory for faces.

Intriguingly, the same links also held for drawings of houses: faithfulness of house drawings could be predicted by people’s face processing skills. In contrast, there was no such link for object processing and drawing. People’s ability to learn and recognize new cars did not predict their ability to draw houses.

In one experiment, the researchers also tested the drawing and face perception skills of artists. This was a more restricted sample, as artists would be predicted to be good at both drawing and face processing.

Unsurprisingly, the artists were quite good at drawing from reference photos. Here are two examples of the most faithful face renditions along with their ratings:

While not reliable, the association between artists’ face processing skills and their drawing faithfulness was in the same direction as for novices.

Overall, this set of findings suggests that talent does matter for drawing, and that talent relates to effectively processing faces. The fact that face processing could predict drawing skill for both faces and houses suggests that both may call upon a more generalizable face processing skill, such as correctly selecting key features that make something distinctive.

So, if you don’t have much drawing experience, how could you tell if putting in ten thousand hours of practice will be worth it? Testing your face perception skills might be a good place to start.

Psychonomics article highlighted in this post:

Devue, C., & Grimshaw, G. M. (2018). Face processing skills predict faithfulness of portraits drawn by novices. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. DOI: 10.3758/s13423-018-1435-8.