Anxious about rejection, avoidant of neglect: Infant marmosets tune their attachment based on individual caregiver’s parenting style

Abstract

Children’s secure attachment with their primary caregivers is crucial for physical, cognitive, and emotional maturation. Yet, the causal links between specific parenting behaviors and infant attachment patterns are not fully understood. Here we report infant attachment in New World monkeys common marmosets, characterized by shared infant care among parents and older siblings and complex vocal communications. By integrating natural variations in parenting styles and subsecond-scale microanalyses of dyadic vocal and physical interactions, we demonstrate that marmoset infants signal their needs through context-dependent call use and selective approaches toward familiar caregivers. The infant attachment behaviors are tuned to each caregiver’s parenting style; infants use negative calls when carried by rejecting caregivers and selectively avoid neglectful and rejecting caregivers. Family-deprived infants fail to develop such adaptive uses of attachment behaviors. With these similarities with humans, marmosets offer a promising model for investigating the biological mechanisms of attachment security.