A few things:
- Talent is typically defined as the ability to improve at a certain skill at a faster rate than one with less (or without, but talent is not a dichotomy) talent, given the same amount of time and equally effective improvement methods. It is not the idea of someone being naturally good at a skill given zero time invested into that skill.
- Talent stems from something biological. Some talents have clearer origins, like for example a high jump world champion was naturally very talented at high jump due to his extremely long Achilles tendon, which gave him more power. Some talents have origins that are still under investigation; though twin studies have been done to show that these skills or factors have a significant hereditary factor. According to a report from the American Psychological Association, 45% of variance in intelligence in children was explained by genetic differences, and 75% of variance in intelligence in late teens and adults was explained by genetic differences.
Does talent exist?The question of whether or not talent exists (by that definition) is something that was solved a long time ago; the example of the high jump world champion was an example of someone being more talented than other high jumpers. Donald Thomas won the 2007 Osaka World Championship for high jump with
only eight months of light training in high jump to his name. The reason for his inclination towards high jump is because of his long Achilles tendon. (This was explained more in-depth in The Sports Gene, I might be giving an insufficient summary of it).
For the same reason, I feel that the exception made for being unable to be extremely good at a skill because of a physical deficiency (e.g. less fingers) to dispute the existence of talent is a moot point. The idea of talent has been based on biological means, and it makes no sense to have an exception to the rule for ones with blatant physical disadvantages; since that's exactly what talent is supposed to be. Talent is not a dichotomy of "he has talent" and "he doesn't have talent", it is a spectrum of how your biology is geared towards the skill in question. Some has a substantial disadvantage from one which doesn't have any biological traits that are geared towards certain skills (i.e. the median), and some others have a substantial advantage from one who is in the median as well.
The question of whether or not talent exists in more cognitive and semantic skills is harder to prove, though twin studies have tried to prove the existence of heritability (and in turn the need for nature) for certain skills. There's the IQ example (and IQ has a high correlation with g-factor,
a construct that is used to measure cognitive ability and has a positive correlation with multiple cognitive tasks), and
there is a study on how mental rotation ability of females with both parents that are entirely right-handed (technically homozygotic for the dominant alleles for a right-shift factor) being worse than females with parents that do not have the right-shift ++ genotype. It goes deeper than handedness obviously, but it shows that certain cognitive skills are, to some degree, hereditary.
This is not to deny that nurture/environmental factors play a part in developing skills; in fact the second link is a model that also shows an interaction with both environmental and biological factors that will influence spatial skills. The main question is whether or not talent for cognitive skills exist, and it does.
Is there a skill ceiling for people with less talent?The more important question afterwards is whether or not this existence of talent will actually affect the "ceiling" of skill for certain abilities. There are probably skill ceilings for skills that require physical ability. I didn't research on this, so I prefer to not give any information on whether or not this has actually been confirmed. I can only give anecdotal evidence of how many players in osu!mania are not able to produce a very fast "vibro" motion, tensing up fingers to produce a jacking motion (think single-tapping very quickly in standard). There are not many players who have produced a vibro speed of 180 BPM 1/4s for 24 notes, and the amount of players who can produce a vibro speed of 200 BPM 1/4s is substantially lower. There is almost no one who can produce a vibro speed of 240 BPM 1/4s for 24 notes that I can think of, even with substantial practice. This is even with observing rhythm game players (and being one of the best in 4K VSRG) for 7-8 years.
For cognitive or semantic skills, there seems to be a skill ceiling for physics and mathematics.
Students with a SAT math score of less than 600 (maximum of 800) has an extremely low chance of getting a GPA of 3.5 in physics or mathematics, and no one with an SAT math score of less than 560 has a GPA of 3.5. However, these two majors seem to be the only two that show this phenomenon. There was a sociology major with a 3.75 GPA but an SAT reading score of 360, for example. There were dozens of examples of low-SAT but high GPA students for almost every other major, but not mathematics and physics.
Another part of the study can be found here.What does this mean?However, the existence of a skill ceiling does not necessarily mean that you'll not be good at the game no matter what. It just means that your upper limit will not be as high as some others. The study talks about attaining a 3.5 GPA overall. Most players who play rhythm games do not put in very much deliberate practice to improve their skill; and if they do, it's typically an accidental discovery. You can still put in deliberate practice to improve, even if your talent level for a skill is 50th percentile. You obviously won't get to the top, but you'll still get pretty far. No one knows how good you'll get, but from what I've seen in VSRG, you can go very far.
It would also be unfair to say that all of the top players used natural talent to get to the level that they are. While there are some players who are (at least in 4K, again I don't want to make assumptions for other game modes), a good portion of them put in thousands of hours of
deliberate practice into the game to get to the level that they are today. No doubt, they improved faster than others, but I don't see how that means much. I also don't particularly like the idea of congratulating people just for the amount of hard work they put in as well; some hard work exerted into skills that have little to negative talent for is mostly fruitless.
tl;drTalent is not a dichotomy, it determines your improvement rate, talent stems from biological means (hereditary), skills can be notably hereditary, talent can determine skill ceilings, but you can still go pretty far even if your amount of talent for a skill is in the 40-50th percentile. A combination of both practice and talent is what takes players to the top; and you can still go far even without a good amount of one of the two. You just have to place your expectations lower.