Work

Experience-dependent emergence of multi-scale spatial organization during foraging in freely moving marmosets

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: How spatial organization emerges through experience in freely moving primates remains incompletely understood. We addressed this question in two common marmosets foraging in a semi-naturalistic depletion-based environment with a fixed spatial layout. With experience, animals increasingly directed choices toward yet-unvisited locations, largely accounted for by the consolidation of a stable transition scaffold, alongside sensitivity to the current depletion state within each foraging episode. This scaffold organized navigation at multiple scales: local transitions became increasingly reliable; complete visitation sequences remained variable, reflecting flexible recombination of local transitions; and the current location predicted visits over multiple subsequent steps, revealing a state-dependent multi-step predictive organization that became increasingly consistent with experience. Together, these findings provide behavioral evidence that multi-scale spatial organization can emerge with repeated foraging experience in freely moving marmosets, and establish a longitudinal, semi-naturalistic behavioral and analytical framework for relating ecological foraging behavior to theoretical and computational accounts of spatial cognition.

Source: iScience

DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2026.117294

Authors: Nada El Mahmoudi, Francesca Lanzarini, Farzad Ziaie Nezhad, Deepak Surendran, Jean Laurens

Institutions: Max Planck Society, Ernst Strüngmann Institute for Neuroscience

Language: English

Topic: Primate Behavior and Ecology

Subfield: Social Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $3,240

Funder: Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung