ABSTRACT
Why study infants’ memory for hidden objects? As an undergraduate student in an introductory psychology course, the first author remembers wondering why anyone would. After all, infants seemed to do pretty much what you would expect them to do in this domain: They succeeded at some simple memory tasks relatively early in life, and got better at more and more complex tasks as they got older. It seemed pretty intuitive and not particularly engaging. Of course, this perspective overlooked the ingenuity of the experimental methods that allowed researchers to determine anything at all about the nature of infants’ memory for hidden objects, as well as many of the subtleties of infant behavior in these tasks. I can now better appreciate (after taking a few twists and turns and eventually coming to research infants’ memory for hidden objects myself) that this perspective also missed two fundamental contributions of research in this domain: advances in thinking about exactly what it means to remember something, and how success in some memory tasks, together with failure in other tasks, can provide a window onto the nature of our memory systems. These contributions are the focus of this chapter.
