Memory as a cognitive requirement for reciprocal cooperation

Memory has evolved to guide our decisions in the present and to prepare us for future interactions with the environment. Within the social domain, memory can help to decide with whom to cooperate. This provides a unique opportunity to study memory from a functional perspective. Although several lines of research have demonstrated that many forms of reciprocal cooperation require memory, most of the research does not support the assumption of a highly specialized cheater-detection module that specifically serves to promote the detection of uncooperative interaction partners. Instead, the literature supports the flexible recruitment of domain-general guessing and memory mechanisms that serve to continuously predict the future behavior of others based on situational and person-specific factors and use violations of these expectations to update the predictive models of who can be trusted to cooperate in reciprocal interactions.