The act or process of centering something; in psychology, the cognitive tendency to focus on one aspect of a situation while ignoring others.
From center + -ation (noun-forming suffix). The psychology meaning was developed by Jean Piaget in his research on child cognitive development.
Piaget discovered that young children show centration—if a glass of juice is poured into a taller, thinner glass, they think there's suddenly more juice because they focus only on height and ignore width.
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