{"doi":"10.1162/jocn_a_02106","title":"The Laboratory of Brain and Cognition: A Brief History","abstract":"The Laboratory of Brain and Cognition (LBC) was founded over 30 years ago by Leslie Ungerleider, Jim Haxby, and myself. That makes it the second longest-lasting laboratory in the Intramural Research Program of the National Institute of Mental Health, eclipsed only by the non-human primate laboratory, the Laboratory of Neuropsychology, that was founded in 1977.Leslie, Jim, and I had known each other since the early 1980s when we were postdoctoral fellows (known at that time as “Staff Fellows”). Jim was in the NIA (National Institute on Aging), I was in the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke, and Leslie was in NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health). Jim and I were both trained as neuropsychologists and were working on the neuropsychological and functional brain imaging characteristics of patients with Alzheimer's disease using fluorodeoxyglucose PET (Haxby & Rapoport, 1986; Martin et al., 1986), while Leslie was engaged in her seminal work on the visual processing streams in the macaque with Mort Mishkin (Ungerleider & Mishkin, 1982). So, although we were in separate institutes, we all knew each other and were familiar with each other's work.By the early 1990s Jim and his colleagues in the NIA, Cheryl Grady and Barry Horowitz, had teamed up with Leslie and Mort to use a faster and much more spatially specific PET scanning method (oxygen15) to evaluate, for the first time, the ventral object vision and dorsal spatial vision pathways in the human brain (e.g., Haxby et al., 1991). It would be difficult to overstate the importance of this work for the history of functional brain imaging at the NIH (National Institutes of Health) and for the neuroimaging community at large. The elegance of the experimental design and the clarity of the findings convincingly showed that one could use this method to localize neural systems and to evaluate the commonalities, and differences, between the human and monkey brain. In addition, having both Leslie and Mort as co-authors provided a stamp of approval that the broader neuroscience community could not ignore. This work also put the NIMH on the map as a potential major player in the burgeoning field of functional neuroimaging of the human brain.Indeed, it was the success of this work that led to a mandate by Susan Swedo, at that time the Scientific Director of the NIMH Intramural Research Program, to begin an international search for someone to head up functional neuroimaging at NIMH. Mort Mishkin was recruited to chair that search. Anyone who knew Mort knew he avoided taking on this kind of administration task at all costs. Mort agreed, but with the stipulation that if we were not able to recruit a suitable candidate, Jim Haxby would be brought over from NIA to head up our functional neuroimaging efforts (https://history.nih.gov/display/history/Ungerleider%2C+Leslie+2002).By the time that recruitment effort fell through, a new plan had been hatched. I had returned to the NIH after several years working on the neuropsychology of HIV/AIDS at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, DC (Grant & Martin, 1994), and was talking to Jim and Leslie about collaborating on brain imaging studies. At the same time, Mort stepped down as the Chief of the Laboratory of Neuropsychology to allow Bob Desimone to become Chief. This created a problem because Bob and Leslie were married at that time and NIH nepotism rules meant that Leslie would have to leave the laboratory. In addition, the NIMH Laboratory of Psychology and Psychopathology (the LPP) was in dire need of new blood and new directions. So, to address all these issues, the three of us were moved out of our respective laboratories into the LPP.This occurred in the early 1990s, and within a short period, we essentially took over the LPP, changed the name to the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, and established three independent sections. The Section on Functional Brain Imaging with Jim as Chief, the Section on Ne","journal":"Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience","year":2024,"id":476229,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":2,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9291,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2024-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":292194,"name":"Alex Martin","orcid":"0000-0002-3636-2498","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":14,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:06:25.428435Z","pmid":"38261359","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}