Response to commentaries on The Psychology of Creative Performance and Expertise (Friedlander, 2024)

This article responds to eleven commentaries on The Psychology of Creative Performance and Expertise (Friedlander, 2024) and the accompanying target article published in this special issue (Friedlander, 2025). The special issue reflects both diversity of theoretical starting points and striking convergence around several shared propositions: that creativity and expertise can be treated within a unified explanatory framework; that multifactorial accounts are needed to move beyond single-cause explanations; and that expertise research benefits from engaging a wider range of domains, methods, and developmental trajectories. In addressing the commentaries, I clarify points of agreement and divergence, including the balance between creativity and expertise across chapters, the role of individual differences and structural moderators of opportunity, and questions concerning mechanisms of control and constraint in skilled performance. I also engage with critiques concerning embodied and enacted expertise, metacognition and metareasoning, and memory mechanisms, including the scope of long-term working memory. The response closes by outlining the pressing need for research on creative expertise under rapidly evolving social and technological conditions.