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

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.