Neurology professionals, what's one method you use to assess cognitive function that you find particularly insightful or reliable?

As an epileptologist, I frequently utilize two techniques of assessing cognitive function. The first is giving code words to test awareness during a suspected seizure. Code words are simple phrases such as a color and object (e.g. "red dog," "blue truck," or "purple pig"). Code words are easy to remember but impossible to guess. If a patient can recall these code words, recollection suggests retained awareness at the time that the words were said. Intact awareness indicates focal onset seizure or possibly that the patient is experiencing nonepileptic events. Lack of awareness and failure to recall a code word indicates a generalized seizure or other generalized encephalopathy. For those patients with medically intractable epilepsy receiving epilepsy surgery evaluation, another technique for extensively assessing cognitive function is neuropsychiatric testing to delineate the functional deficit zone of the brain. The goal of epilepsy surgery is to identify and remove or destroy the epileptogenic zone of the brain, and the functional deficit zone can provide noninvasive concordant data to suggest impactful surgical options. In focal epilepsy, the functional deficit zone is predictable with both lateralizing and localizing features. For example, visual-spatial deficits and visual processing disorders localize well to the nondominant temporal lobe while verbal memory impairment predicts involvement of the dominant temporal lobe. The degree and localization of neuropsychiatric impairment also can predict what cognitive deficits are possible after surgery or if concordant epilepsy surgery is predicted to cause minimal change to the patient’s neurocognitive profile. With the additional data of the scalp electroencephalogram (EEG) ictal pattern, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain, and other functional studies, epileptologists may suggest highly precise and efficacious surgeries for their patients with intractable epilepsy by thoroughly assessing cognitive functions with neuropsychiatric testing.