Development of item-space and item-time binding

The capacity to integrate various features of an event (e.g. spatial and temporal information) into a bound representation of the event is essential for episodic memory and depends critically on the hippocampus. Item-space and item-time binding operations emerge in infancy, but it is not until the beginning of the third year of life that they afford the ability to retain and flexible reinstate arbitrary associations between events and their spatio-temporal context. Further behavioral improvement occurs from childhood into adolescence. Structural and functional development of the hippocampus has been implicated to explain these changes, but future studies should demonstrate a direct link between behavioral development and hippocampal change.