The visual primates that we are: ‘Learning by watching’ in children and monkeys

Piagetian approaches highlight that children actively explore their environment, engaging in sampling behaviour that is tailored to satisfy their curiosity. The Vygotskian approach paints children as their interactive partners’ little apprentice, where this ‘more knowledgeable other’ shape children’s learning from these interactions. We present here a series of studies that examine how children visually explore their environment with different interactive partners, consisting of objects both familiar and novel to them, and whether their sampling behaviour strives to resolve their subjective uncertainty about their knowledge about the novel objects, and how they learn from these interactions. We suggest that any language learning theory must consider both the interactive partner’s pedagogical status and curiosity of the child.

We investigated spatial foraging behavior of a pair of rhesus macaques in a controlled terrain and found that looking at the partner is associated with the partner’s superior skills in the task and occurs more frequently during the learning phase (unpublished). In another foraging experiment, a human competed against a macaque using a pre-determined foraging strategy (ksiezak et al., Complex Networks, 2023). By precisely tracking humans' and macaques' postures, we show that looking at the partner precedes coordinated actions.

Learning of complex social behavior, such as cooperation, stems from our ability to perceive and respond to visual cues from others in our environment. However, the neural processing of visual information to guide social decisions is unknown. Here, we wirelessly recorded the spiking activity of populations of neurons in the visual and prefrontal cortex in conjunction with wireless recordings of oculomotor events while freely moving macaques engaged in social cooperation. We propose a general mechanism for learning social interactions whereby increased spike timing coordination between visual cortex V4 and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) during social events leads to improved encoding and distributed representation of social variables within each brain region. Our results indicate that the visual-frontal cortical network prioritizes relevant sensory information to facilitate learning social interactions while freely moving macaques interact in a naturalistic environment (Franch et al, Nature, 2024).