Memory is at the core of our cognitive and social development. Understanding its ontogeny has important implications for childcare and education, and for elucidating how memory is supported in the adult brain. The past few decades have witnessed creative and ingenious ways of examining infants in order to appreciate what they are learning and if they remember, coupled with insights from surface ERP recordings of cortical responses. Models and testing of infant memory have been greatly influenced by a taxonomy that was popularised in the adult literature in the 1980s, which emphasised the dichotomy between declarative or explicit memory, and nondeclarative or implicit memory. Because this taxonomy was in large part driven by data from amnesic patients with hippocampal damage, this scheme has been used to make inferences about the functionality of the infant hippocampus.