"All people have a natural curiosity about their own memory. This curiosity was tweaked several years ago by reports in the popular press of recovered memories from early childhood. These reports also renewed a long-standing debate bout whether infants can actually remember for any length of time. Some researchers argue that infants possess only a primitive memory system that cannot encode specific events (Mandler, 1998), that early development is characterized by "infantile amnesia" (the absence of enduring memories; Pillemer & White, 1989), that children cannot remember events until they can rehearse them by talking about them (Nelson, 1990), and that children younger than 18 months are incapable of representation (Piaget, 1952); others argue that the behavior of older infants and children is shaped by their earlier experiences (Watson, 1930) and that adult personality is shaped by memories of events that occurred in infancy (Freud, 1935). Surprisingly, this debate has been waged in the absence of date from infants themselves. This article reviews new evidence that infants' memory processing does not fundamentally differ from that of older children and adults. not only can older children remember an event that occurred before they could talk, but even very young infants can remember an event over the entire infantile-amnesia period if they are periodically reminded."