Neural Heterogeneity Underlying Behavioral Equivalence: A Dynamic Neuro‐Decoding Study of Cognitive and Affective Empathy in Relation to Autism‐Like Traits

PURPOSE: Although empathy processing varies significantly between individuals with high and low autism-like traits (ALT), the underlying neural mechanisms remain poorly understood. This study integrated behavioral measures with electroencephalography (EEG) analyses to investigate neural processing differences between high- and low-ALT groups during cognitive and affective empathy tasks. METHOD: We assessed cognitive empathy (judging depicted emotions) and affective empathy (rating personal emotional resonance) in 40 participants (21 high-ALT and 19 low-ALT) using the Multifaceted Empathy Test while concurrently recording EEG data. Our analytical approach combined traditional behavioral analysis with multivariate pattern analysis and representational similarity analysis. RESULTS: Behaviorally, the groups showed no significant performance differences. However, their neural mechanisms diverged. During cognitive empathy, the high-ALT group exhibited inefficient early sensory processing and delayed, discontinuous neural encoding of emotion categories, suggesting reliance on late-stage compensatory processing. For affective empathy, while early automatic neural resonance was intact, the high-ALT group exhibited atypically sustained reliance on low-level sensory features and failed to form stable, integrated neural representations of emotion, unlike the low-ALT group. CONCLUSION: These findings reveal a pattern of "behavioral equivalence, neural heterogeneity." High-ALT individuals appear to employ distinct, compensatory neural strategies to achieve typical behavioral outcomes in empathy. This highlights the value of advanced neuro-decoding in uncovering latent processing differences underlying the ALT spectrum.