Centration

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In psychology, centration is the tendency to focus on one salient aspect of a situation and neglect other, possibly relevant aspects. [1] Introduced by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget through his cognitive-developmental stage theory, centration is a behaviour often demonstrated in the preoperational stage. [2] Piaget claimed that egocentrism, a common element responsible for preoperational children's unsystematic thinking, was causal to centration. [2] Research on centration has primarily been made by Piaget, shown through his conservation tasks, while contemporary researchers have expanded on his ideas.

Contents

Conservation tasks

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. [1] 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, [3] 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. [1]

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. [3] [4] 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.

Children demonstrated conservation of weight and length through a similar task. In this one, children were shown two balls of Playdoh that were equal in size. [3] When asked whether they were the same or not, all children answered that yes, they were. Afterwards, Piaget rolled one of the balls into a longer string and asked the same question: “Which one is bigger?”. Children who experienced centration focused on the length of the newly shaped Playdoh, or the width of the old Playdoh, and often said that one or the other was bigger. Those children who were able to focus on both dimensions, both length and width, were able to say that both clumps of Playdoh were still the same size.

Egocentrism

Piaget believed that in each period of development, a deficit in cognitive thinking could be attributed to the concept of egocentrism. [5] Egocentrism, then, refers to the inability to distinguish one's own perspective from that of others, but does not necessarily imply selfishness or conceit. [6] In speech, children are egocentric when they consider matters only from their own perspective. For example, a young egocentric boy might want to buy his mother a toy car for her birthday. This would not be a selfish act, as he would be getting her a present, but it would be an action that did not take into account the fact that the mother might not like the car. The child would assume that his mother would be thinking the same thing as himself, and would therefore love to receive a toy car as a gift. [7] Animism – the attribution of life to physical objects – also stems from egocentrism; children assumed that everything functions just as they do. As long as children are egocentric, they fail to realize the extent to which each person has private, subjective experiences. In terms of moral reasoning, young children regard rules from one perspective, as absolutes handed down from adults or authority figures. [8] [9] [10] Just as the egocentric child views things from a single perspective, the child who fails to conserves focuses on only one aspect of the problem. For example, when water is poured from one glass into a shorter, broader one, the child ‘centers’ on a single striking dimension – the difference in height. The child cannot ‘decenter’ and consider two aspects of the situation at once. Centration, essentially, can be seen as a form of egocentrism in specific tasks involving scientific reasoning. [1]

Perseveration

While centration is a general tendency for children within various cognitive tasks, perseveration, on the other hand, is centration in excess. Perseveration can be defined as the continual repetition of a particular response (such as a word, phrase, or gesture) despite the absence or cessation of a stimulus. It is usually caused by brain injury or other organic disorder. [11] In a broader sense, perseveration is used to describe a wide range of functionless behaviours that arise from a failure of the brain to either inhibit prepotent responses or to allow its usual progress to a different behavior. This includes impairment in set shifting and task switching in social and other contexts. [12]

Perseveration and centration are connected, in that centration is a basis for perseveration, but perseveration itself is seen to be a symptom of injury. Where perseveration is more of an issue when seen in adults, centration is a deficit in children's thinking that can be overcome more easily, through typical developmental gains.

Decentration

Children generally achieve conservation of liquids at about 7 years. When they do so, they are entering the stage of concrete operations. Overcoming centration can be seen in three main forms. First, the child might use the identity argument – that you haven't added or take any away, so it has to be the same. Second, the argument of compensation might be used, where the child states that tallness of the one glass and the wideness of the other glass cancel each other out. Third, an inversion reasoning is possible, where the child might suggest they are still the same because you can pour water from the wide glass back into the tall glass to create two equal looking glasses once again. [13] Underlying these arguments are logical operations – mental actions that are reversible. Since these are mental actions, the child does not actually need to perform or have seen the transformations they are talking about. [1]

Piaget argued that children master centration and conservation spontaneously. The crucial moment comes when the child is in a state of internal contradiction. [14] This is shown when the child first says that one glass has more because it's taller, than says the other has more because it is wider, and then becomes confused. Once this internal contradiction is resolved by the child themselves, by taking into account multiple aspects of the problem, they decenter and move up onto the concrete operational stage.

Multitasking, seen through cognitive flexibility and set-shifting, requires decentration so that attention may be shifted between multiple salient objects or situations. As well, decentration is essential to reading and math skills in order for children to move beyond the individual letters and to the words and meanings presented. [15]

Other research

As shown earlier, the aspect of quantitative understanding that most interested Piaget was the child's ability to conserve quantities in the face of perceptual change. Later studies have not disproved Piaget's contention that a full understanding of conservation is a concrete operational achievement. Recent work does suggest, however, that there may be earlier, partial forms of understanding that were missed in his studies. [16]

Investigators have simplified conservation tasks in various ways. They have reduced the usual verbal demands, for example, by allowing the child to pick candies to eat or juice to drink rather than answer questions about “same” or “more.” Or they have made the context for the question more natural and familiar by embedding the task within an ongoing game. Although such changes do not eliminate the non-conservation error completely, they often result in improved performance by supposedly preoperational 4- and 5-year-olds. [17] [18] [19] Indeed, in simple situations, even 3-year-olds can demonstrate some knowledge of the invariance of number. A study by Rochel Gelman [20] provides a nice example. In her study, the 3-year-old participants first played a game in which they learned, over a series of trials, that a plate with three toy mice affixed to was a “winner” and a plate with two toy mice was a “loser.” Then, in a critical test trial, the three-mice plate was surreptitiously transformed while hidden. In some cases, the length of the row was changed; in other cases one of the mice was removed. The children were unfazed by the change in length, continuing to treat the plate was a winner. An actual change in number, however, was responded to quite differently, eliciting search behaviours and various attempt at an explanation. The children thus showed a recognition that number, at least in this situation, should remain invariant.

One should note, however, that studies purporting to show earlier competence on conservation tasks have themselves been criticized. [11] [21] In particular, these critiques suggest that methodological changes in the early competence studies may bias younger children to conserve due to lower level mechanisms. Children's complete of these tasks, therefore, may be due more to perceptual mechanisms rather than cognitive mechanisms of true conservation and an understanding of invariance. Thus, children may simply be sensitive to discriminating the delete or addition of information, rather than conserving information across changes in the display.

See also

Related Research Articles

Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning. Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, which held from the 1920s to 1950s that unobservable mental processes were outside the realm of empirical science. This break came as researchers in linguistics and cybernetics, as well as applied psychology, used models of mental processing to explain human behavior. Work derived from cognitive psychology was integrated into other branches of psychology and various other modern disciplines like cognitive science, linguistics, and economics. The domain of cognitive psychology overlaps with that of cognitive science, which takes a more interdisciplinary approach and includes studies of non-human subjects and artificial intelligence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Developmental psychology</span> Scientific study of psychological changes in humans over the course of their lives

Developmental psychology is the scientific study of how and why humans grow, change, and adapt across the course of their lives. Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to include adolescence, adult development, aging, and the entire lifespan. Developmental psychologists aim to explain how thinking, feeling, and behaviors change throughout life. This field examines change across three major dimensions, which are physical development, cognitive development, and social emotional development. Within these three dimensions are a broad range of topics including motor skills, executive functions, moral understanding, language acquisition, social change, personality, emotional development, self-concept, and identity formation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean Piaget</span> Swiss psychologist, biologist, logician, philosopher and academic

Jean William Fritz Piaget was a Swiss psychologist known for his work on child development. Piaget's theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called genetic epistemology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Piaget's theory of cognitive development</span> Theory that discusses human intelligence from an epistemological perspective

Piaget's theory of cognitive development, or his genetic epistemology, is a comprehensive theory about the nature and development of human intelligence. It was originated by the Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980). The theory deals with the nature of knowledge itself and how humans gradually come to acquire, construct, and use it. Piaget's theory is mainly known as a developmental stage theory.

Cognitive development is a field of study in neuroscience and psychology focusing on a child's development in terms of information processing, conceptual resources, perceptual skill, language learning, and other aspects of the developed adult brain and cognitive psychology. Qualitative differences between how a child processes their waking experience and how an adult processes their waking experience are acknowledged. Cognitive development is defined as the emergence of the ability to consciously cognize, understand, and articulate their understanding in adult terms. Cognitive development is how a person perceives, thinks, and gains understanding of their world through the relations of genetic and learning factors. There are four stages to cognitive information development. They are, reasoning, intelligence, language, and memory. These stages start when the baby is about 18 months old, they play with toys, listen to their parents speak, they watch TV, anything that catches their attention helps build their cognitive development.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Egocentrism</span> Inability to differentiate between self and others

Egocentrism refers to difficulty differentiating between self and other. More specifically, it is difficulty in accurately perceiving and understanding perspectives other than one's own. Egocentrism is found across the life span: in infancy, early childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Although egocentric behaviors are less prominent in adulthood, the existence of some forms of egocentrism in adulthood indicates that overcoming egocentrism may be a lifelong development that never achieves completion. Adults appear to be less egocentric than children because they are faster to correct from an initially egocentric perspective than children, not because they are less likely to initially adopt an egocentric perspective.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Conservation (psychology)</span> Logical thinking ability

Conservation refers to a logical thinking ability that allows a person to determine that a certain quantity will remain the same despite adjustment of the container, shape, or apparent size, according to the psychologist Jean Piaget. His theory posits that this ability is not present in children during the preoperational stage of their development at ages 2–7 but develops in the concrete operational stage from ages 7–11.

The A-not-B error is an incomplete or absent schema of object permanence, normally observed during the sensorimotor stage of Jean Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development.

The imaginary audience refers to a psychological state where an individual imagines and believes that multitudes of people are listening to or watching them. It is one of the mental constructs in David Elkind's idea of adolescent egocentrism. Though the term refers to an experience exhibited in young adolescence as part of development, people of any age may harbor a fantasy of an imaginary audience.

The model of hierarchical complexity (MHC) is a framework for scoring how complex a behavior is, such as verbal reasoning or other cognitive tasks. It quantifies the order of hierarchical complexity of a task based on mathematical principles of how the information is organized, in terms of information science. This model was developed by Michael Commons and Francis Richards in the early 1980s.

According to Alberts, Elkind, and Ginsberg the personal fable "is the corollary to the imaginary audience. Thinking of themselves as the center of attention, the adolescent comes to believe that it is because they are special and unique.” It is found during the formal operational stage in Piagetian theory, along with the imaginary audience. Feelings of invulnerability are also common. The term "personal fable" was first coined by the psychologist David Elkind in his 1967 work Egocentrism in Adolescence.

Domain-general learning theories of development suggest that humans are born with mechanisms in the brain that exist to support and guide learning on a broad level, regardless of the type of information being learned. Domain-general learning theories also recognize that although learning different types of new information may be processed in the same way and in the same areas of the brain, different domains also function interdependently. Because these generalized domains work together, skills developed from one learned activity may translate into benefits with skills not yet learned. Another facet of domain-general learning theories is that knowledge within domains is cumulative, and builds under these domains over time to contribute to our greater knowledge structure. Psychologists whose theories align with domain-general framework include developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, who theorized that people develop a global knowledge structure which contains cohesive, whole knowledge internalized from experience, and psychologist Charles Spearman, whose work led to a theory on the existence of a single factor accounting for all general cognitive ability.

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Bärbel Elisabeth Inhelder (15 April 1913 – 17 February 1997) was a Swiss psychologist most known for her work under psychologist and epistemologist Jean Piaget and their contributions toward child development.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mental operations</span>

Mental operations are operations that affect mental contents. Initially, operations of reasoning have been the object of logic alone. Pierre Janet was one of the first to use the concept in psychology. Mental operations have been investigated at a developmental level by Jean Piaget, and from a psychometric perspective by J. P. Guilford. There is also a cognitive approach to the subject, as well as a systems view of it.

The water-level task is an experiment in developmental and cognitive psychology developed by Jean Piaget. The experiment attempts to assess the subject's reasoning ability in spatial relations. To do so the subject is shown pictures depicting various shaped bottles with a water level marked, then shown pictures of the bottles tilted on different angles without the level marked, and the subject is asked to mark where the water level would be.

Role-taking theory is the social-psychological concept that one of the most important factors in facilitating social cognition in children is the growing ability to understand others’ feelings and perspectives, an ability that emerges as a result of general cognitive growth. Part of this process requires that children come to realize that others’ views may differ from their own. Role-taking ability involves understanding the cognitive and affective aspects of another person's point of view, and differs from perceptual perspective taking, which is the ability to recognize another person's visual point of view of the environment. Furthermore, albeit some mixed evidence on the issue, role taking and perceptual perspective taking seem to be functionally and developmentally independent of each other.

Horizontal and vertical décalage are terms coined by developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, which he used to describe the four stages in Piaget's theory of cognitive development: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operations, and formal operations. According to Piaget, horizontal and vertical décalage generally occur during the concrete operations stage of development.

Adolescent egocentrism is a term that child psychologist David Elkind used to describe the phenomenon of adolescents' inability to distinguish between their perception of what others think about them and what people actually think in reality. Elkind's theory on adolescent egocentrism is drawn from Piaget's theory on cognitive developmental stages, which argues that formal operations enable adolescents to construct imaginary situations and abstract thinking.

The Three Mountains Task was a task developed by Jean Piaget, a developmental psychologist from Switzerland. Piaget came up with a theory for developmental psychology based on cognitive development. Cognitive development, according to his theory, took place in four stages. These four stages were classified as the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational stages. The Three Mountain Problem was devised by Piaget to test whether a child's thinking was egocentric, which was also a helpful indicator of whether the child was in the preoperational stage or the concrete operational stage of cognitive development.

References

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  2. 1 2 Piaget, Jean (1968) [1964]. Six psychological studies. Translated by Tenzer, Anita; Elkind, David. New York, NY: Vintage Books.
  3. 1 2 3 Piaget, Jean; Szeminska, Alina (1941). The child's conception of number. Translated by Cattegno, C.; Hodgson, F. M. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.
  4. ↑ Inhelder, Barbel (1971). "The criteria of the stages of mental development". In Tanner; Inhelder, Barbel (eds.). Discussions on child development. New York, NY: International Universities Press.
  5. ↑ Piaget, Jean (1969). "Piaget rediscovered". In Ripple; Rockcastle (eds.). Development and learning. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
  6. ↑ Piaget, Jean (1959) [1923]. The language and thought of the child. Translated by Gabain, M. London, UK: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
  7. ↑ Berger, Kathleen (2014). Invitation to the Life Span (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Worth Publishers. p. 182. ISBN   978-1-4641-7205-2.
  8. ↑ Piaget, Jean (1972) [1924]. Judgment and reasoning in the child. Translated by Warden, M. Savage, MD: Littlefield, Adams.
  9. ↑ Piaget, Jean (1963) [1926]. The child's conception of the world. Translated by Tomlinson, J.; Tomlinson A. Savage, MD: Littlefield, Adams.
  10. ↑ Piaget, Jean (1965) [1932]. The moral judgment of the child . Translated by Gabain, M. New York, NY: Free Press. ISBN   978-0-317-30591-3.
  11. 1 2 Helm-Estabrooks, Nancy (2004). "The problem of perseveration". Seminars in Speech and Language. 25 (4): 289–290. doi: 10.1055/s-2004-837241 . PMID   15599818.
  12. ↑ Winn, Philip (1941). Dictionary of Biological Psychology. New York, NY: Taylor & Francis.
  13. ↑ Piaget, Jean; Inhelder, Barbel (1969). The psychology of the child . Translated by Weaver, H. New York, NY: Basic Books.
  14. ↑ Piaget, Jean; Inhelder, Barbel (1969). The psychology of the child . Translated by Weaver, H. New York, NY: Basic Books.
  15. ↑ Oswalt, Angela. Dombeck, Mark (ed.). "Cognitive Development: Piaget Part II". MentalHelp.net. Retrieved 18 December 2014.
  16. ↑ Vasta, R.; Younger, A.J.; Adler, S.A.; Miller, S.A.; Ellis, S. (2009). Child Psychology (Second Canadian ed.). Mississauga, ON: John Wiley & Sons Canada, Ltd.
  17. ↑ Donaldson, Margaret (1982). "Conservation: What is the question?". British Journal of Psychology. 73 (2): 199–207. doi:10.1111/j.2044-8295.1982.tb01802.x.
  18. ↑ Miller, Scott (1976). "Nonverbal assessment of Piagetian concepts". Psychological Bulletin. 83 (3): 405–430. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.83.3.405.
  19. ↑ Miller, Scott (1986). "Certainty and necessity in the understanding of Piagetian concepts". Developmental Psychology. 22: 3–18. doi:10.1037/0012-1649.22.1.3.
  20. ↑ Gelman, Rochel (1972). "Logical capacity of very young children: Number invariance rules". Child Development. 43 (1): 75–90. doi:10.2307/1127873. JSTOR   1127873.
  21. ↑ Halford, Graeme; Boyle, Frances (1985). "Do young children understand conservation of number?". Child Development. 56: 165–176. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.1985.tb00095.x.
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