Date: October 18, 2026
Time: 3:30 pm to 5:00 pm
Room: Coral 4
Track: Cross-Cutting Special Interest Group (SIG)
Traditional clinical endpoints in neurorecovery trials often emphasize functional success (e.g., task completion) while providing limited insight into the mechanisms that drive recovery. This limitation is evident across motor, speech, language, and cognitive rehabilitation, where standard outcome measures may fail to capture compensatory strategies or underlying neural reorganization. As a result, meaningful biological and behavioral improvements may be overlooked, and promising therapies may be inadequately evaluated.
This session will highlight emerging approaches to outcome measurement in speech, cognition, and motor recovery that move beyond accepted endpoints to incorporate detailed behavioral profiling, error-based analyses, process-level cognitive metrics, and quantitative performance measures such as kinematic analysis. We will discuss how these methods address domain-specific challenges in aphasia, cognitive impairment, and motor dysfunction while clarifying distinctions between impairment-level change and functional compensation. Emphasis will be placed on improving sensitivity to treatment effects and aligning outcome measures more closely with mechanisms of neural plasticity.
By integrating insights across motor, language, speech, and cognition, this session aims to challenge how neurorecovery is measured and to advance a mechanism-informed framework for translationally meaningful trial endpoints.
At the conclusion of this session, attendees will be able to:
In this presentation, Dr. Turkeltaub will discuss how alexia is common and limits independence. Highlighting a detailed dissection of reading skills can improve diagnostic precision and may guide targeted treatment.
In this presentation, Dr. Lin will review the current landscape of upper extremity motor outcome measures and propose a new mechanistic framework.
In this presentation, Dr. Kayser will discuss building work in cognitive neuroscience. Dr. Kayser will review mechanisms of working memory and discussing how these mechanisms may inform therapies.