Centration in child development refers to the tendency of young children to focus on one salient aspect of a situation while neglecting other relevant aspects. This concept is a key attribute of the preoperational stage of cognitive development, according to Jean Piaget's theory. For example, a child may focus solely on the number of pieces of cake each person has, disregarding the size of the pieces, leading to a conservation error
. During this stage, children may also exhibit irreversibility, which refers to their difficulty mentally reversing a sequence of events, and conservation errors, which involve the inability to understand that altering an object's appearance does not change its basic properties
. Centration is considered to be a form of egocentrism in specific tasks involving scientific reasoning. It is closely related to conservation tasks, which test a child's ability to determine that a certain quantity remains the same despite adjustments to the container, shape, or apparent size
. In summary, centration in child development is a cognitive tendency observed in the preoperational stage, characterized by a child's focus on one aspect of a situation while disregarding others, which can lead to errors in understanding conservation and irreversibility
