ABSTRACT
Piaget’s (1972) concept of decentering captures this refocusing of attention as one aspect of the capacity for abstract thought that he related to the principles of conservation. In earlier stages of development, children may focus only on immediate sensory perceptions of, for example, either height or width when comparing two volumes differing in shape. At later stages of development, children can create an abstract mental representation of the objects, and thus consider the height and width simultaneously in judging which has greater volume. As development advances, preoperational thinking changes from shifting focus sequentially among various aspects of the physical world to mature decentering ability, which requires balancing and integrating simultaneously various aspects of an internalized representation of the world.
