This special issue is dedicated to research that adopts the microgenetic method in order to investigate change as it is happening. In this commentary we reflect on the diversity of the articles included in this special issue, and examine how the findings from these articles relate to five critical features of change: path, rate, breadth,…

In their commentaries, Carver, Richmond and DeBoer pose several challenging and insightful questions in response to our target article. Two key themes emerged from their commentaries, which are important in the field of infant memory research. The first concerns the use of deferred imitation as a paradigm, and its relationship to other methods of…

Jones and Herbert describe research on deferred imitation and how this research reflects on the development of explicit memory in infancy. The article raises several interesting questions about how the medial temporal lobe memory system develops. In this commentary, I discuss some of the additional theoretical and empirical questions that are…

Age-related changes in representational flexibility are a characteristic feature of declarative memory development. The authors suggest that a qualitative shift in the nature of infants' memory representations accounts for increasing memory flexibility with age. We will argue that a comprehensive theory of declarative memory development must (1)…

What capabilities are required for an organism to evince an "explicit" understanding of gaze as a mentalistic phenomenon? One possibility is that mentalistic interpretations of gaze, like concepts of unseen, supernatural beings, are culturally-specific concepts, acquired through cultural learning. These abstract concepts may either require a…