{"doi":"10.1162/jocn_e_02253","title":"From Cells to Circuits, from Vision to Cognition, from Monkeys to Humans: Leslie Ungerleider's Pioneering Neuroscience","abstract":"By any measure, Leslie Ungerleider was an extraordinary and pioneering neuroscientist (Behrmann, 2021; Kastner, 2021; Van Essen, Kastner, & Bandettini, 2021). Her meticulous research had a profound impact on our understanding of the neural mechanisms of primate vision, and her dedicated mentorship helped support the careers of many trainees and colleagues (Buffalo et al., 2021; Liu et al., 2021). Her scientific journey took her from a PhD at New York University (with Ted Koons) to the University of Oklahoma and Stanford University, where she worked with Karl Pribram, before she arrived at National Institutes of Health to work with Mort Mishkin in 1975. She went on to cofound the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition in the Intramural Program of the National Institute of Mental Health in the early 1990s and served as its Chief for the rest of her career (Haxby, 2024; Martin, 2024).One of the most striking aspects of Leslie's career was her ability to reinvent herself and push her research, and the rest of the field, in novel directions. From lesion and behavioral studies in nonhuman primates, to neuroanatomy, electrophysiology and then fMRI in both human and nonhuman primates, Leslie produced a body of work that is notable for its rigor, breadth, and incisiveness. This breadth is reflected in the 20 articles collected in this Special Focus, many authored by former colleagues and trainees, that highlight critical aspects of Leslie's work and its influence. In this introduction, we focus on four areas in which she had significant impact on the field and our understanding of the functional neuroanatomy of the brain.Perhaps the most influential contribution of Leslie's career was the development of the two cortical pathways framework in collaboration with Mort Mishkin (Figure 1). The identification of distinct dorsal and ventral pathways originating in primary visual cortex (V1) subserving “where” or “what” processing, respectively, relied on careful and systematic brain lesion studies combined with elegant behavioral paradigms (Baker & Kravitz, 2024). Such an approach provides direct insight into the function of the neural substrate (Richmond & Eldridge, 2024). The critical contribution of the two pathways framework was that it grounded our understanding of behavior and physiology in the underlying neuroanatomy.It is impossible to overstate the significance of the two pathways framework and how it fueled subsequent work. Much debate has focused on how best to characterize the functional roles of the two pathways (Vaziri-Pashkam, 2024), interactions between the pathways (Puce, 2024), as well as why there should be segregation at all (Han & Sereno, 2024) and how best to define what a “pathway” is (Ritchie, Montesinos, & Carter, 2024). One of Leslie's final contributions was to propose the existence of a third visual pathway critical for social perception, which includes the motion-selective middle temporal area and regions in the banks of the STS, with distinct functional properties from the dorsal and ventral pathways (Küçük, Foxwell, Kaiser, & Pitcher, 2024).Although the identification of the two pathways provided a critical framework, the details of the underlying neuroanatomy needed to be characterized. In a series of intricate and definitive neuroanatomical studies, Leslie identified projections of visual areas along the two pathways, highlighting major cortical and subcortical targets such as regions in the banks of STS, the pulvinar nucleus, and the basal ganglia. Such anatomical information revealed the complexity of the visual pathways and provided a critical foundation for interpreting the neurophysiological data that she also started to acquire in awake, behaving nonhuman primates, often in collaboration with Bob Desimone who joined National Institute of Mental Health in 1980. Leslie always emphasized the importance of considering the underlying anatomy both for elucidating the role of individual areas, such as V1 (Marcondes ","journal":"Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience","year":2024,"id":504039,"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":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9526,"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":268758,"name":"Sabine Kästner","orcid":"0000-0002-9742-965X","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":233517,"name":"Chris I. Baker","orcid":"0000-0001-6861-8964","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":25,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:10:35.597333Z","pmid":"39348142","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":[]}