Determinants and trajectories of musical talent in adolescence. [Determinanten und Verläufe musikalischer Begabung im Jugendalter].

So far, only a few long-term studies have described musical developmental trajectories with a focus on giftedness research (Müllensiefen 2017). This article aims to fill this gap and to answer the question of how helpful different approaches to giftedness are for modeling musical development using data from an international long-term study. The aim is to investigate how different definitions of musical giftedness and their statistical implementation affect the selection of musically gifted individuals. For this purpose, classical giftedness criteria according to Gagné (1998) and the TAD approach (Preckel et al. 2020) are used for classification and the results are compared. In both approaches, fluid intelligence, working memory capacity, the personality dimension openness, and the belief in the changeability of musicality through training, prove to be robust predictors. As a central point of difference, the assessed perceptual musical abilities of gifted participants, selected according to classical criteria, decrease from the first measurement time point. The results are discussed with reference to the phenomenon of regression to the mean, suggesting that long-term data and the TAD approach provide a more suitable approach for making decisions about musical giftedness in adolescents