Precise overlapping neural representations between feeling and seeing touch in people with high tactile empathy

Empathy allows us to understand and sometimes vicariously experience what someone else is feeling[1][1],[2][2]. For some people this extends to tactile sensations, with reports of feeling touch when seeing others being touched[3][3],[4][4]. Major theories claim that tactile empathy relies on overlapping neural representations between feeling and seeing touch[5][5]–[8][6]. Here we test this using time-resolved decoding of electroencephalography (EEG) data collected while participants felt touch to the fingers or watched videos of touch to another person’s fingers. A classifier trained and tested on brain activation patterns during tactile trials could distinguish touch to the thumb versus little finger, demonstrating remarkable sensitivity to small neural differences. In people with high tactile empathy, who report feeling touch when watching videos of touch, these tactile classifiers cross-generalised to visual trials. These data show that representations of feeling and seeing touch overlap, including fine-grained information about touch location on the hand. The timing suggests that early visual predictions of touch location involve later (high-level) tactile representations. Our results demonstrate that EEG decoding can extract precise neural signatures for location of touch and suggest that shared neural representations underpin tactile empathy. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. [1]: #ref-1 [2]: #ref-2 [3]: #ref-3 [4]: #ref-4 [5]: #ref-5 [6]: #ref-8