Explanations for the prevalence of both these cultural phenomena across the animal kingdom have focused on social learning mechanisms and the cognition that these are assumed to entail. The term ‘social learning mechanism’ (henceforth SLM) relates to the kinds of cues to which individuals pay attention when learning from conspecifics [14, 15]. When considering inheritance of traditions, some researchers have emphasized that cognitively demanding forms of social learning would be required to maintain the fidelity and adaptedness of traditions [16–20]. Moreover, it is generally accepted that the key to generating cumulative cultural change is transmission fidelity of learned skills, and the cognitively demanding forms of social learning on which the latter is thought to rely [4, 13].