The place of neuroscience in cognitive sciences has continuously been increased. From a modest partner of artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology at the beginning of cognitive revolution, it has become the main leader of the field. This “neurocognitive turn” is in fact one of the major paradigm shift in the cognition studies since the birth of cognitive neuroscience (see for inst. Shallice & Cooper 2011).

At the same time many technical progress have been made, that allow us to observe through fundamentally new methods the activity of a human brain. At the turn of the 1990s a couple of imaging techniques were successfully applied to the neural system, like the Positron Emission Tomography or the functional Resonance Magnetic Imaging (Petersen & al 1988, Belliveau & al 1991). Such new techniques of functional brain imaging have had and still have a major impact on the field of cognitive studies, impact sometimes referred to as an “instrumental revolution”, in the way the invention of the telescope shaped the post-Galilean astronomy (Posner 1993) – up to the point that contemporary cognitive sciences can barely do whiteout it.

However, those techniques are not exempt from criticism: lively debates take place today between the proponents of imaging and the supporters of alternative methods in cognitive science (Hanson & Bunzl 2010). Unfortunately, little attention has been given to this point by the historians of science, the few reviews on this topic being written by the actors themselves (Raichle 1998).

This presentation will give some insights in the historical background of the emergence and rise of functional brain imaging. Based on the scientific literature published between 1988 and 1995, we intend to show how the technology of fMRI was quickly and widely accepted in the cognitive psychologists community. Our materials are of three kinds: i) quantitative bibliometric study in the early devoted publications (Neuroimage and Human Brain Mapping), ii) qualitative study of some papers on specific cognitive science topics (spatial navigation, mental imagery…) and their evolution through this instrumental revolution, iii) institutional life at this critical point (biographies of actors of the field, reshaping of research centers and technology platforms,…).