Interpretable Fuzzy Modeling Reveals Population-Level Representation Differences in P300 Brain Computer Interfaces Across Neurodivergent and Neurotypical Cohorts

Abstract

P300-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are widely used for communication, but population heterogeneity may alter the neural patterns available for decoding. Prior work has mainly examined such differences at the signal or performance level, while the representation structure learned by the decoder remains underexplored. In this study, we propose an interpretable fuzzy spatiotemporal framework for P300 classification and use it to analyze population-level differences across amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), autism (AUT), and neurotypical (NT) cohorts. The model employs spatial and temporal fuzzy filters with learnable prototypes, enabling both classification and reconstruction of cohort-specific fuzzy centers. Experiments were conducted on ALS and NT subsets from bigP3BCI and on the BCIAUT-P300 benchmark in a within-subject setting. The proposed model achieved competitive performance against multiple deep learning baselines. More importantly, the reconstructed fuzzy centers revealed systematic cohort-dependent differences in waveform morphology and representation geometry. Point-wise statistical analysis identified significant temporal differences between cohorts, including intervals overlapping with the canonical P300 window, and low-dimensional embeddings showed partially separated cohort-specific prototype organizations. These results suggest that population heterogeneity in P300-BCI is reflected not only in decoding performance but also in the discriminative structure learned by the model. The proposed framework provides an interpretable route toward population-aware P300-BCI analysis and design.