The constitution of general and specific mental models of other people

This article is about how novices become experts in the domain of piano pla ying, focusing on how they develop internalized models of other people, a f orm of culture in the mind. Six novice and nine junior expert college stude nts were individually asked to practice a short piece of music; they were a sked to verbalize what they thought during the exercise about the performan ce they were executing and how they planned to perform it after their pract ice sessions had been concluded. The novices seemed to have internalized a generalized 'other' in their mind, who commanded them to perform accurately and smoothly as goals of the exercise, The junior experts seemed to posses s also a model of the audience in their mind, from the perspective of whom they could check and refine their performance. Interviews with two concert class pianists showed that they possessed not only generalized others but a lso specific others in their mind and could refine their performance based on these models. How experts can be creative in spite of a set of constrain ts posed by the culture is discussed.