There is no unique offset of infantile amnesia, no single developmental moment at which memory-relevant encoding begins. Whether a childhood experience is later remembered (in some sense) depends on both the nature of the experience itself and the paradigm being used to determine whether it is in fact remembered. The papers in this issue of Developmental Review illustrate that point for various ingenious non-verbal memory paradigms, but the same principle applies to explicit verbal recall. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.