Centration

In psychology, centration is the tendency to focus on one salient aspect of a situation and neglect other, possibly relevant aspects. Introduced by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget through his cognitive-developmental stage theory, centration is a behaviour often demonstrated in the preoperational stage. Piaget claimed that egocentrism, a common element responsible for preoperational children’s unsystematic thinking, was causal to centration. Research on centration has primarily been made by Piaget, shown through his conservation tasks, while contemporary researchers have expanded on his ideas.

Piaget used a number of tasks to test children’s scientific thinking and reasoning, many of which specifically tested conservation. Conservation refers to the ability to determine that a certain quantity will remain the same despite adjustment of the container, shape, or apparent size. Other conservation tasks include conservation of number, substance, weight, volume, and length.

Perhaps the most famous task indicative of centration is the conservation of liquids task. In one version, the child is shown two glasses, A1 and A2, that are filled to the same height. The child is asked if the two glasses contain the same amount of liquid, in which the child almost always agrees that they do. Next, the experimenter pours the liquid from A2 to glass P, which is lower and wider. The child is then asked if the amount of liquid is still the same. At the preoperational stage, children will respond that the amount is not the same, with either the taller glass or the wider glass containing more liquid. Once the child has reached the concrete operational stage, however, the child will conclude the amount of liquid is still the same.

Here, centration is demonstrated in the fact that the child pays attention to one aspect of the liquid, either the height or the width, and is unable to conserve because of it. With achievement of the concrete operational stage, the child is able to reason about the two dimensions simultaneously and recognize that a change in one dimension cancels out a change in the other.

In the conservation of numbers task, Piaget gave children a row of egg cups and a bunch of eggs, placing them in rows of equal length, but not equal number. Piaget then asked the children to take just enough eggs to fill the cups, and when the children attempted to do so, they were surprised to find that they had too many or too few eggs. Again, centration is present here, where the child pays attention to the length of the rows and not the numbers within each row.

...
Wikipedia