One of the great feats of human perception is the generation of quick impressions of both physical and social events based on sparse displays of motion trajectories. Here we aim to provide a unified theory that captures the interconnections between perception of physical and social events. A simulation-based approach is used to generate a variety of animations depicting rich behavioral patterns. Human experiments used these animations to reveal that perception of dynamic stimuli undergoes a gradual transition from physical to social events. A learning-based computational framework is proposed to account for human judgments. The model learns to identify latent forces by inferring a family of potential functions capturing physical laws, and value functions describing the goals of agents. The model projects new animations into a sociophysical space with two psychological dimensions: an intuitive sense of whether physical laws are violated, and an impression of whether an agent possesses intentions to perform goal-directed actions. This derived sociophysical space predicts a meaningful partition between physical and social events, as well as a gradual transition from physical to social perception. The space also predicts human judgments of whether individual objects are lifeless objects in motion, or human agents performing goal-directed actions. These results demonstrate that a theoretical unification based on physical potential functions and goal-related values can account for the human ability to form an immediate impression of physical and social events. This ability provides an important pathway from perception to higher cognition.

人类感知的一项伟大成就是基于运动轨迹的稀疏显示生成物理和社会事件的快速印象。在这里，我们旨在提供一个统一的理论，以捕捉对物理事件和社会事件的感知之间的相互联系。基于模拟的方法用于生成描绘丰富行为模式的各种动画。人体实验使用这些动画来揭示动态刺激的感知经历了从物理事件到社会事件的逐渐过渡。提出了一种基于学习的计算框架来解释人类的判断。该模型通过推断一系列捕获物理定律的潜在函数和描述代理目标的价值函数来学习识别潜在力。该模型将新动画投射到具有两个心理维度的社会物理空间中：对是否违反物理定律的直观感觉，以及对代理是否具有执行目标导向行动的意图的印象。这个衍生的社会物理空间预测了物理事件和社会事件之间的有意义的划分，以及从物理感知到社会感知的逐渐过渡。该空间还预测人类对单个物体是运动中的无生命物体还是执行目标导向动作的人类代理的判断。这些结果表明，基于身体潜在功能和目标相关价值观的理论统一可以解释人类对身体和社会事件形成直接印象的能力。