Diverse strategy-learning stylesromote cooperation in evolutionary spatialrisoner's dilemma game

Abstract

Observational learning andractice learning are two important learning styles andlay important roles in our information acquisition. In thisaper, we study a spacial evolutionaryrisoner's dilemma game, wherelayers can choose the observational learning rule or theractice learning rule when updating their strategies. In theroposed model, we use aarameter controlling thereference oflayers choosing the observational learning rule, and found that there exists an optimal value of leading to the highest cooperation level, which indicates that the cooperation can beromoted by these two learning rules collaboratively and one single learning rule is not favor theromotion of cooperation. By analysing the dynamical behavior of the system, we find that the observational learning rule can make thelayers residing on cooperative clusters more easily realize the bad sequence of mutual defection. However, a too high observational learningrobability suppresses thelayers to form compact cooperative clusters. Our results highlight the importance of a strategy-updating rule, more importantly, the observational learning rule in the evolutionary cooperation.