Several years ago, a conference was organized with the aim of identifying the merits and shortcomings of current research on memory development. In the resulting publication by Weinert & Perlmutter (l988) the contributors agreed that despite the progress that has been made in understanding children ' s memory , much remains to be learned about the natural course of memory development. As apparent from the book's organization , strategies, meta memory , and the knowledge base were conceived of as major determinants of memory development. Further, the roles of social and motivational contexts as weil as implications of individual differences were discussed in detail.Typical of more recent research is a shift in emphasis from the separate study of determinants of memory development to the analysis of possible interplay among strategies and knowledge in memory performance (cf. Bjorklund, in press;Schneider & Pressley, 1989) . Given the enormous interest and intensive research activities in the field since the mid-eighties, one major reason for organizing a second conference on the topic only a few years later was to get a better picture of the kind of progress that has been made recently in the area of memory development.Another goal of the second conference was to broaden the perspective on research in the domain of memory development by including research on interactions among knowledge, strategies and aptitudes conducted in areas of cognitive development other than memory. In our view, memory processes represent a specific class of general problem-solving activities. Accordingly, the issue of generalizability of findings from memory research to thinking, reasoning, and comprehension processes in other problem-solving tasks deserves special attention.In the following, we will use the state-of-the-art represented in the above book as a frame of reference for our comments. In doing so, we will first focus on a few general issues that were already addressed as potential problems in the mid-eighties and seem similarly controversial today . Next, we will turn to so me theoretical issues and empirical findings that, at least in our view , demonstrate recent progress. Basic agreements and (possible) disagreements which were unveiled during the conference and are reflected in this book will be high-