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The study of development vacillates between a focus on change (i.e., studying how and why infants are so different from adults) and excitement about early competence and continuity (i.e., studying how capable infants are, and marveling at how similar they turn out to be to adults). The study of memory development has been no exception. This article discusses the findings and shortcomings of several studies that focus on memory development in infants. Areas of focus include: (1) Infantile amnesia; (2) Explicit memory with the subtypes semantic and episodic memory; (3) Nonspatial relational memory, spatial relational memory, and episodic memory; and (4) Unitary representations and separated representations. Recommendations for future research include studying the role of age-related changes in sleep patterns in creating age-related changes in hippocampally-dependent memory functions, as well as whether changes in memory after the age of 4 years are entirely linked to change at the cortical level. While researchers are tantalizingly on the brink of exciting breakthroughs in the understanding of the development of memory and the relation of behavioral and neural change, there is much that is still not understood.

The article discusses research being done on the neurobiology of human memory. It references the study "The Ontogeny of Human Memory: A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective, Where Are We?," by A. Jabès and C. A. Nelson in the 2015 issue. Topics discussed include the study of memory development in school-age children, the nature of the basic explicit memory functions, and the neural substrates of memory. The transition in hippocampally-dependent spatial learning is also discussed.