Drawing on previous work [21, 24], we focus on cohesive grouping and environments with patchy resources where each patch has multiple resource types. This provides an empirically relevant context for primates and other social learning species, and is the context in which LE was found to generate both cultural phenomena . In addition, previous work has established that protracted learning (as opposed to instantaneous learning) is a prerequisite for both traditions and cumulative culture . If learning is protracted it becomes susceptible to stochastic variation in sampling frequencies, leading to arbitrary differences in the evaluation of, and preferences for, different resource types. This generates a positive feedback where more familiar resources are more favourably evaluated and hence more often chosen [21, 23, 24]. As a result, in diverse environments, learning can lead to idiosyncratic sub-optimal behavioral repertoires (i.e. local attractors in learning space that are history-defined and self-reinforcing). Social learning through LE and SE causes behavioral repertoires and familiarity biases to be shared amongst group members, thereby leading to the emergence of traditions [21–24]. Here, in the context of skill learning, we vary the protractedness of skill learning by varying the ‘task difficulty’ of resources in the environment.