centration

Centration is a term used in developmental psychology to describe the tendency to focus attention on one salient dimension of a problem while neglecting other relevant aspects. It is most associated with the preoperational stage of child development, proposed by Jean Piaget, roughly between ages 2 and 7.

In conservation tasks, centration leads children to judge quantity based on perceptual features such as height, length, or appearance rather than actual amount. For instance, in the liquid conservation task, a child may believe the taller, narrower glass contains more liquid than a shorter, wider one, despite equal volumes. Similar errors can occur with number, mass, or area when a single feature dominates judgment.

Centration is connected to a broader difficulty with mental transformations and reversibility—key components lacking in the preoperational stage. As children develop into the concrete operational stage (about ages 7 to 11), they typically decenter, considering multiple dimensions and understanding that transformations can be reversed. Rates and extents of decentering vary with task, context, and culture, and some critics argue that Piaget underestimated younger children’s abilities or overgeneralized the stage model.

In contemporary psychology, centration is discussed as a specific example of attentional or perceptual biases in early cognition, used to illustrate limits of early logical thinking rather than as a fixed trait. It remains a foundational concept in introductory discussions of child development.