Unconventionally trendy: The pluralistic endeavour of Cortex into the human cognitive neurosciences

This viewpoint summarizes conversations between three generations of cognitive neuropsychologists about Cortex's contributions to our understanding of human cognition. We structured our conversation along a historical timeline and focused on selected key topics, that we also contributed to. Beginning with the advent of neuropsychology, and its focus on language disorders and hemispheric lateralisation, we quickly moved to the birth of Cortex in the 1960s pausing our conversion on spatial cognition and the critical window offered by unilateral neglect on its representational understanding. Realising that as time went by, the initial focus on impaired cognition expanded towards healthy individuals too, we noticed it coincided with the emergence of sophisticated imaging methods, and with them, the possibility to better draw the functional architecture of the brain across all known cognitive domains. In parallel, research on neuropsychological disorders had to include those implied by ageing, which rapidly became a critical topic due to the impressive increase of older individuals in Western societies. With the massive availability of data and shared information in the last decades, we observed a rise in open science practices and identified a clear future, yet to be fully unclosed, for a re-definition of neuropsychological profiles through big data in what is labelled as precision psychology. Across this journey, Cortex stood up for its unconventionally trendy, pluralistic and unbiased approach, which we hope will continue to be faithful to those core elements that are necessary to explain human cognition, which is, undoubtedly, among the most complex scientific subjects to tackle