Memristors are the fourth basic circuit element in addition to the three classical elements: resistor, capacitor, and inductor, which have great application prospects in the fields of information storage, logic operations and neuromorphic networks. The recent development of memristors and memristive mechanism is reviewed, including connotations and characteristics of memristors, memristive mechanism, types of memristive mateirals, and application prospects of memristors. Finally, the key problems and development proposals are presented and a prospect on the development trend is also given.