Collegium Helveticum
Switzerland
fellow
Jolinde Vlaeyen
2026-2027
Discipline(s)
Biology
Theme(s)
Cultural Studies; Identity; Other
Fellowship dates
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Biography
Jolinde Vlaeyen (born 1993 in Belgium) is a behavioral biologist interested in social cognition, cooperation, and social learning in non-human animals, with a particular focus on primates and cetaceans. Jolinde is driven by a curiosity about the shared building blocks of social cognition: how individuals perceive, communicate, and coordinate with one another, and how these abilities emerge across social systems. Her research began with communication and development in primates and has since expanded into social learning and the emergence of coordinated behavior, with communication remaining a common thread throughout.
Jolinde received her PhD from Osnabrück University (DE) in 2026. In her doctoral thesis, she studied wild bonobo mother-infant communication in the Democratic Republic of Congo, investigating the development of turn-taking. Alongside this, she has also been working on wild bottlenose dolphins with the Cedar Key Dolphin Project in Florida (US). Jolinde is passionate about sharing her science with the broader public, writing articles for Conversation Africa and The Hidden Coast, and is a member of the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) working group of the European Federation for Primatology.
Research Project
Learning Landscapes: How Social Structures Shape the Transmission of Complex Cultural Behaviors
Complex, coordinated behaviors—ones requiring different individuals to take on different roles—emerge in some animal societies but not others. This project investigates how social structure shapes what and how animals learn from one another.
Culture, defined as information or behavior acquired from others through social learning, is widespread across the animal kingdom. Societies vary widely in social organization, from largely solitary species, to stable matrilineal groups, to fluid fission–fusion systems where composition can shift by the hour, each shaping learning opportunities and who learns from whom. Yet it remains unclear why particular cultural behaviors, such as coordinated actions requiring different roles, emerge in some social systems but not others.
This project aims to uncover how social structure shapes the pathways and biases of social learning, and whether complex, coordinated behaviors emerge more readily in socially complex systems. It combines a cross-taxa comparative synthesis with a high-resolution study of a unique foraging behavior—driver–barrier feeding, with role specialization—in bottlenose dolphins.
Research Interests:
social behavior; animal societies; social structure; culture