 Humans, and some non-human animals, are natural social learners. A crucial form of social learning is enabled by their cultural capacities, typically understood as capacities that allow them to acquire and transmit cultural information. The number, character, and contribution of the different psychological mechanisms that underlie these cultural capacities remain a matter of much debate within cognitive science, as does the issue of which ones are required to produce and sustain not just culture but complex cultural traits and cumulative culture. This section describes research that investigates these capacities, the methodological and evidential reasoning involved, and some of the conceptual issues that it raises.