Dynamics of cooperation in spatial prisoner's dilemma of memory-based players

Abstract

In a population of extremely primitive players with no memory, interaction with local neighbors in a spatial array can promote the coexistence of cooperators and defectors, which is not possible in the well mixed case (Nowak, Bonhoeffer, and May, 1994). However, the applicability of this insight is unclear in the context of a social system where memory plays a significant role in the conscious decision-making of the members. In this paper, the problem of cooperation is analyzed in a population of players with the memory model embodied in the ACT-R cognitive architecture (Anderson and Lebiere, 1998). Using agent-based simulations, it is shown that in a population of memory-based agents, spatial structure supports higher levels of cooperation in comparison to the well mixed paradigm. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011.