[3][4] He is the founding director of the Center for Nutrition, Learning, and Memory (CNLM), a partnership of the University of Illinois and Abbott Laboratories as of 2011.
[11] In 1990 Cohen joined the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he became the director of the Amnesia Research Laboratory.
[15] On June 30, 2014, Neal Cohen was named the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Initiative (IHSI) at the University of Illinois.
[22] Prior to the ground-breaking work of Brenda Milner, Suzanne Corkin and others studying the amnesiac patient Henry Molaison, researchers had assumed that memory was an emergent property of the cerebral cortex or brain as a whole.
[24] In 1980, at the University of California, San Diego, Neal Cohen and Larry Squire were able to show that amnesic patients were just as effective as normal subjects at the task of learning to read mirror-reversed print.
A major focus of his work has been the role played by the hippocampus, located in the medial temporal lobe of the brain, in forming relational memories.
[30] The hippocampus rapidly forms associations between incoming information about people, places, objects, and their spatial, temporal, and interactional relationships, and connects them to reactivated relational memories.
[32][33] The property of "representational flexibility" is considered to be critical, and as derivable from "the kind of system that must necessarily evolve to store environmental spatial information".
However, it is hoped that understanding the types of deficits affecting a patient, in specific cases, may make it possible to identify and take advantage of their remaining strengths to improve their interactions with others.
[12] Because of a lack of facilities in Champaign-Urbana, Cohen and his students travel to medical schools elsewhere to work with patients who have brain disorders such as amnesia, Alzheimer's disease, or schizophrenia.