Final answer:
Centration is a concept that occurs in Piaget's preoperational stage of cognitive development, where children focus on one aspect of a situation, neglecting others, and have difficulty understanding conservation tasks due to their egocentric viewpoint.
Step-by-step explanation:
Centration is a term coined by Jean Piaget to describe the tendency of children in the preoperational stage of cognitive development to focus on one salient aspect of a situation while neglecting other possible factors. This stage occurs approximately between the ages of 2 to 7 years. A classic example of centration is the conservation task, where a child may see two equal amounts of liquid in identical containers, but when one amount is poured into a differently shaped container, the child will perceive the amount of liquid to have changed. In this stage, children's thinking is dominated by their own perception of the world and they are unable to take into account transformations that do not alter the properties of objects, such as mass or volume.
During the preoperational stage, children also exhibit egocentrism, meaning they find it difficult to see situations from perspectives other than their own. Piaget's theory outlines that children slowly develop the ability to decenter and perform more complex cognitive operations as they progress into the subsequent stage, which is the concrete operational stage. This cognitive development is part of an ongoing process of assimilation and accommodation, where children adapt their mental models or schemata to incorporate new information.