On Linking Cognitive Mechanisms to Game Play

Abstract

Tomonori Morikawa, James E. Hanley, and John Orbell have argued that natural selection leads populations who play Hawk-Dove, a game-theoretic stylization of confrontation, to develop the capacity for various `orders of recognition.? Such an argument requires a model linking game play to the presence or absence of various cognitive mechanisms. Morikawa and colleagues present such a model but, I argue, leave it incomplete, unable to sustain the conclusions they wish to defend. The development of a more fully specified model would significantly assist future studies of cognitive structures related to game play.