Developmental trajectories of vocal behaviors in common marmosets as a reference framework for neurobehavioral...

Nonhuman primates are essential model animals for understanding brain development and neurodevelopmental disorders. The common marmoset is becoming a key primate species due to its ease of handling and reproductive efficiency, along with increasing research resources, such as an MRI brain atlas of developing marmosets. The present study aims to further support the use of marmosets by providing a detailed description of the developmental trajectories of vocal behaviors with an automated system to detect and analyze vocalizations. We collected 64,736 vocalizations, classified them into 11 vocal types, and observed significant changes in their vocal behaviors from neonates to 12 weeks of age. Several call types, including Trill, Phee, and Cry, peaked around the sixth week before gradually declining. By contrast, calls such as immature Phee, and Twitter were most frequent at birth but decreased steadily, nearly disappearing by 6-8 weeks. In addition, we provide a platform for automatically detecting these vocalizations using artificial neural networks trained on a dataset applicable across various research contexts. Overall, this study not only describes the developmental trajectories of vocal behaviors in a fixed controlled context across developmental stages, but also serves as a reference framework for analyzing marmoset models of developmental disorders.