APA Dictionary of Psychology

in Piagetian theory, the extent to which a child’s attention is focused on states (e.g., the appearance of an object) rather than transformations (i.e., what is done to the object), and vice versa, at different stages of cognitive development. At the preoperational stage, children center their attention on specific states and ignore the transformations between states, whereas the reverse is true for children at the concrete operational stage.