Can someone explain to me what "cognitive empathy" is?

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and how does it differ from functional empathy? Is it connected to understanding things like facial expressions/ body language, or is it more about imagining what it would be like to be someone? Can someone clarify?

I will have a go.

I think this is what researchers were looking at in relation to Theory of Mind . I think they were observing all those and more in their subnects.

I think the term refers to all these following being present.
The first was the subject recognising that another person had some emotion present. The second was the ability of the subject to ID ntify that emotion, the third was to make an interesting informed guess at the other person's thought process or what they would have seen of a situation from their viewpoint, and last of all being able to formulate some way of real being appropriately.

That is quite a precise ref notion of empathy and more precise than people generally mean when using the word in general conversation.

Researchers noticed significant differences in how week a typical person and an autistic person did each stage of that above process.

Unfortunately, the research conclusions are wrongy translated as"Autistic people don't have empathy"

Cognition is perceiving or understanding something, so cognitive empathy is simply recognising that someone else is perceiving something differently to you. It differs from emotional empathy as that is being sad when others are sad, that kind of thing. However you can know someone is sad without feeling sad yourself, or wanting to help that person not be sad. That is cognitive empathy, the actual recognition.

Two basic types of empathy: Affective Empathy and Cognitive Empathy.

Affective Empathy is your ability to recognise how someone is feeling (eg. determine that someone is sad based on their facial expression). People with Autism and Asperger's are generally almost as good as Neurotypicals at this.

Cognitive Empathy is your ability to see things from another person's perspective, which is essential to know how to respond to what you know from Affective Empathy. I know I've been in situations quite a few times where I know someone is sad, but I have no clue how to respond; maybe if I could see things from their perspective, I might know what they need.

I've never heard the term "Function Empathy" before, but I'm guessing it's a combination of both Affective and Cognitive Empathy.

An example of a test for Cognitive Empathy which doesn't touch Affective Empathy at all is the Sally Anne test, which can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjkTQtggLH4.

This is usually failed by young children with Autism/Asperger's, but I had no problem with it; I'm thinking that once you're a bit older than the kid in the video, you probably just use straight logic to compensate for lack of Cognitive Empathy which is supposed to be tested.

My understanding is similar to SplendidSnail's, but slightly different.

Cognitive empathy is the ability to read emotions and to judge how another person might feel or react. e.g., being able to understand that when someone asks, "Do I look fat?", they're looking for compliments, and to respond appropriately.

Affective empathy is being able to feel what another person is experiencing. For instance, if someone says that their mother is dying, you'd feel sad for them.

Cognitive empathy is what autistics struggle with; they may not notice that someone looks deflated, or recognize that someone might be offended if they agree "oh, yes, you do look fat." Autistic people are often accused of not having affective empathy because they don't seem to show appropriate empathy for a situation. However, it's not really that autistics don't have affective empathy, but rather that if you don't recognize someone is sad or happy to begin with, you can't feel that emotion for them. If you did pick up those cognitive signals, you'd demonstrate affective empathy just fine.

Conversely, sociopaths are quite good at cognitive empathy. But they're unable to actually "feel" what another person is feeling. They know quite well you're sad or angry or what have you, but they don't care.