how do particles know when they are being observed?
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They don’t. “Observed” in this context really refers to being measured, or forced to pick a state. It has nothing to do with someone actually looking at them.
For example imagine if a particle can take two paths, A or B, and show up at a detector afterwards. If absolutely nothing changes between them taking either path then the particle acts like it took both paths. But once something changes depending on if it takes one path or the other, like a counter ticks up if it takes path A, then it acts like it takes one path or the other.
How does it “know” to change its behavior this way? Presumably something about the measurement, interacting with the particle in some way, causes this change. It “collapses the waveform” such that instead of acting like a wave which can pass through both paths it acts like a particle that can only go through one or the other.
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