For about a century there has been a modest research effort to explain the nature of prodigies and savants. Savant research emerged out of the medical field and centered on deficit/remediation. Research with prodigies generally consists of case studies by psychologists with an interest in the manifestation and development of extreme talent, sometimes as part of the “gifted child” movement in the United States, more recently as anomalies in developmental psychology.

Research into both phenomena evolved to incorporate new questions, including debates over the role of general versus specific intellectual abilities in talent development. This chapter summarizes and reviews research on prodigies and savants. It also reviews what, to date, has been found about the nature and interplay of general and specific intellectual strengths and weaknesses more generally, offering a possible role for both specific talent and general ability.

INTRODUCTION

In a recent review of research on creativity, Sternberg and Lubart (1996) found that most approaches to the topic have been unidimensional, choosing to focus on one or another aspect of creativity to the neglect of others. This tendency to isolate a single dimension of the topic has had the effect of distorting the findings of research; a single feature (say, cognitive processes) is taken to be the whole of creativity, while other equally important features (say, motivation or cultural context) are ignored (Sternberg & Lubart, 1996). Along with a number of others (e.g., Csikszentmihalyi, 1988a, 1988b; Feldhusen & Goh, 1995; Feldman, 1990; Gardner, 1993; Simonton, 1988), Sternberg and Lubart (1996) recommend a multidimensional approach to the study of creativity:

This chapter will follow the recent trend toward conceptualizing creativity as a multidimensional construct, and creative accomplishment as representing the interaction or confluence among these dimensions (Gardner, 1983/1993, 1988, 1989; Sternberg & Lubart, 1996).