He was the founding Director of the Brain and Mind Institute at the University of Western Ontario where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Visual Neuroscience.

Goodale then returned to the UK where he was a Postdoctoral Fellow from 1969 to 1971 in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, under the supervision of Lawrence Weiskrantz.

Goodale has also argued that actions such as grasping, which are mediated by dorsal-stream mechanisms, take place in real time and are directed at visible objects.

Thus, when a delay is introduced between viewing a display and initiating the grasping movement, the scaling of the grip aperture is now sensitive to illusions.

[8][11] In recent years, Goodale has been using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate activity in the dorsal and ventral streams during the performance of visually guided actions.

[10] These and other neuroimaging studies of object recognition and grasping in the Goodale laboratory have provided additional support for the proposed division of labour between the dorsal and ventral streams.

[14] In 1999, the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science gave him their Donald O. Hebb Distinguished Contribution Award.

With a series of elegant experiments he has refined and extended the proposal that there are two visual systems, and his account is now part of almost every textbook in vision, cognitive neuroscience, and psychology.