[2] Piaget claimed that egocentrism, a common element responsible for preoperational children's unsystematic thinking, was causal to centration.
Conservation refers to the ability to determine that a certain quantity will remain the same despite adjustment of the container, shape, or apparent size.
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.
Piaget believed that in each period of development, a deficit in cognitive thinking could be attributed to the concept of egocentrism.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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] 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.
[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.