Models of Mental Simulation

Jessica Hamrick joins us this week to discuss her work studying mental simulation. Her research combines machine learning approaches with behavioral methods from cognitive science to help explain how people reason and predict outcomes. Her recent paper Think again?

Guest

Jessica Hamrick: I am a Member of Technical Staff at Reflection AI working on reasoning and agentic RL for post-training. Previously, I was a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, where I helped to develop RL-based reasoning methods for Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking and Gemini 2.5. My research has also focused on model-based reinforcement learning, structured relational architectures, and cognitive science.