Simple 3D Pose Features Support Human and Machine Social Scene Understanding

Humans effortlessly recognize social interactions from visual input, yet the underlying computations remain unknown, and social interaction recognition challenges even the most advanced deep neural networks (DNNs). Here, we hypothesized that humans rely on 3D visuospatial pose information to make social judgments, and that this information is largely absent from most vision DNNs. To test these hypotheses, we used a novel pose and depth estimation pipeline to automatically extract 3D body joint positions from short video clips. We compared the ability of these body joints to predict human social judgments in the videos with embeddings from over 350 vision DNNs. We found that body joints predicted social judgments better than most DNNs. We then reduced the 3D body joints to an even more compact feature set describing only the 3D position and direction of people in the videos. We found that this minimal 3D feature set, but not its 2D counterpart, was necessary and sufficient to explain the prediction performance of the full set of body joints. These minimal 3D features also predicted the extent to which DNNs aligned with human social judgments and significantly improved their performance on these tasks. Together, these findings demonstrate that human social perception depends on simple, explicit 3D pose information.