[2603.27410] Grounding Social Perception in Intuitive Physics

Quantitative Biology > Neurons and Cognition arXiv:2603.27410 (q-bio) [Submitted on 28 Mar 2026] Title:Grounding Social Perception in Intuitive Physics Authors:Lance Ying, Aydan Y. Huang, Aviv Netanyahu, Andrei Barbu, Boris Katz, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Tianmin Shu View a PDF of the paper titled Grounding Social Perception in Intuitive Physics, by Lance Ying and 6 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:People infer rich social information from others' actions. These inferences are often constrained by the physical world: what agents can do, what obstacles permit, and how the physical actions of agents causally change an environment and other agents' mental states and behavior. We propose that such rich social perception is more than visual pattern matching, but rather a reasoning process grounded in an integration of intuitive psychology with intuitive physics. To test this hypothesis, we introduced PHASE (PHysically grounded Abstract Social Events), a large dataset of procedurally generated animations, depicting physically simulated two-agent interactions on a 2D surface. Each animation follows the style of the Heider and Simmel movie, with systematic variation in environment geometry, object dynamics, agent capacities, goals, and relationships (friendly/adversarial/neutral). We then present a computational model, SIMPLE, a physics-grounded Bayesian inverse planning model that integrates planning, probabilistic planning, and physics simulation to infer agents' g...