{"pk":30058,"title":"Adventures in Flatland: Perceiving Social Interactions Under Physical Dynamics","subtitle":null,"abstract":"People make fast, spontaneous, and consistent judgementsof social situations, even in complex physical contexts withmultiple-body dynamics (e.g. pushing, lifting, carrying, etc.).What mental computations make such judgments possible? Dopeople rely on low-level perceptual cues, or on abstract con-cepts of agency, action, and force? We describe a new exper-imental paradigm, Flatland, for studying social inference inphysical environments, using automatically generated interac-tive scenarios. We show that human interpretations of events inFlatland can be explained by a computational model that com-bines inverse hierarchical planning with a physical simulationengine to reason about objects and agents. This model out-performs cue-based alternatives based on hand-coded (multi-nomial logistic regression) and learned (LSTM) features. Ourresults suggest that humans could use a combination of intu-itive physics and hierarchical planning to interpret complex in-teractive scenarios encountered in daily life.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"social perception; theory of mind; intuitivephysics; Bayesian inverse planning; hierarchical planning"}],"section":"Poster Session 3","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8ms286cp","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Tianmin","middle_name":"","last_name":"Shu","name_suffix":"","institution":"Massachusetts Institute of Technology","department":""},{"first_name":"Marta","middle_name":"","last_name":"Kryven","name_suffix":"","institution":"Massachusetts Institute of Technology","department":""},{"first_name":"Tomer","middle_name":"D.","last_name":"Ullman","name_suffix":"","institution":"Harvard University","department":""},{"first_name":"Joshua","middle_name":"B.","last_name":"Tenenbaum","name_suffix":"","institution":"Massachusetts Institute of Technology","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2020-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/30058/galley/19912/download/"}]}