Developmental trajectories of pain empathy: evidence from drift diffusion modeling and EEG time-frequency analysis

Pain empathy develops from childhood into adulthood, but the cognitive and neural processes that support this development remain incompletely understood. The present study analyzed behavioral and electroencephalography (EEG) data from 120 participants (children, adolescents, and adults) who completed an Attention-to-Pain-Cue (A-P) task and an Attention-to-Non-Pain-Cue (A-N) task with painful and non-painful limb images. A hierarchical drift-diffusion model (HDDM) was used to characterize latent decision processes, and EEG time-frequency analyses were used to examine alpha- and beta-band event-related desynchronization (ERD). Across alternative DDM specifications, children showed lower drift rates, wider decision boundaries when averaged across image types, and longer non-decision times than older participants, which could be interpreted as differences in domain-general decision dynamics within pain-related task contexts. The EEG results showed age-related differences in alpha- and beta-band ERD, with reduced neural differentiation between painful and non-painful stimuli in children when pain cues were task-irrelevant. Together, these findings suggest that pain-related processing across development is shaped by both general maturation of decision processes and the increasing ability to maintain neural sensitivity to pain cues under changing attentional demands.