A lot of discussion is done these days regarding the actual novelty of newcomer nature-inspired approaches. Crucial role on that matter is played by the mechanisms included in these approaches, where many of these mechanisms have been previously introduced as part of another algorithm. On the other hand, a good practice would be to use the mechanisms of a nature-inspired algorithm to enhance the performance or to overcome the drawbacks of another one. This paper investigates this issue, where four mechanisms have been isolated and studied. Furthermore, the well-known Particle Swarm Optimization and Firefly Algorithm were used to test the effect of the studied mechanisms on the exploration and exploitation of established approaches that suffer from premature convergence or mostly explore the search space, respectively.