Texas A&M University (TAMU) PSYC 307 Developmental Psychology Exam 2 Practice Test

Centration is the tendency to focus on a single perceptually salient feature of an object or event. In early development, children often fixate on one dimension—like the height of a liquid in a glass—while ignoring another dimension such as volume, which leads to incorrect judgments in conservation tasks. This is why a child might say the tall glass has more liquid even when both glasses hold the same amount. The other options describe different cognitive processes—perspective-taking, memory recall, and learning from others—not the tendency to fixate on one feature.