Final answer:
Centration is a focus on one aspect of an object or situation, characteristic of children in the preoperational stage (ages 2-7) according to Piaget's theory of cognitive development. It leads to a limited perspective, such as failing to understand that properties of objects remain the same despite changes in form or appearance. Centration gives way to more complex thinking in the concrete operational stage (ages 7-11).
Step-by-step explanation:
Centration is a term coined by Jean Piaget to describe a kind of focus in young children's thought processes during his proposed preoperational stage of cognitive development. This stage typically occurs between the ages of 2 and 7. Centration refers to the tendency for children at this stage to center their attention on one aspect of an object or situation, leading to a limited perspective. For example, a child might judge the quantity of liquid in a glass based on its height rather than its volume, thereby assuming that a taller glass holds more liquid than a shorter one, even if the two contain the same amount.
Centration is evident during Piaget's conservation tasks, where children fail to recognize that properties such as volume, mass, and number remain the same despite changes in the form or appearance of objects. An example of this is when children are presented with two identical balls of clay; after one is rolled into a long sausage shape, children at the centration stage will often believe that the sausage shape contains more clay due to its longer appearance, despite having seen that no clay was added or removed during the transformation.
In Piaget's stages of cognitive development, he postulated that children pass through a series of stages of increasing complexity and abstraction in their thinking. Centration is specifically a feature of the preoperational stage, which is succeeded by the concrete operational stage where children gain the ability to focus on multiple aspects of a problem and begin to understand conservation.