Accurate reactions open up the way for more cooperative societies

We consider a prisoner's dilemma model where the interaction neighborhood is defined by a square lattice. Players are equipped with basic cognitive abilities such as being able to distinguish their partners, remember their actions, and react to their strategy. By means of their short-term memory, they can remember not only the last action of their partner but the way they reacted to it themselves. This additional accuracy in the memory enables the handling of different interaction patterns in a more appropriate way and this results in a cooperative community with a strikingly high cooperation level for any temptation value. However, the more developed cognitive abilities can only be effective if the copying process of the strategies is accurate enough. The excessive extent of faulty decisions can deal a fatal blow to the possibility of stable cooperative relations.