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People who have suffered brain damage, such as from a stroke or a tumor, sometimes have trouble understanding what’s in front of them.

They may be able to see that an object is curved and yellow, for example, but not be able to recognize it for what it is, a banana.

This phenomenon had baffled scientists until two National Institute of Mental Health researchers discovered that there are two distinct pathways within the brain — one that recognizes “what” an object is and another that determines “where” it is in a spatial sense.

Now, nearly 30 years later, Leslie Ungerleider and Mortimer Mishkin have won the 2012 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Psychology, which carries a $100,000 prize.

“Their work has just had a tremendous effect on promoting new discoveries as to how the brain works, especially with respect to our visioning system,” Woody Petry, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at U of L and faculty director for the Grawemeyer in psychology, said in an interview.

Speaking Tuesday from her office in Bethesda, Md., Ungerleider recalled how, as a postdoctoral fellow, she and Mishkin ran experiments on monkeys with brain lesions for six or seven years in the late 1970s and early 1980s before publishing their work in 1982 and 1983.

Ungerleider, 65, said she was “speechless” upon learning that she and Mishkin, 85, had won the Grawemeyer.

Ungerleider said the pair were first nominated for the award 10 years ago, and each year they would update their curriculum vitae at the request of the award committee, but the nod would go to someone else.

“Each year I would tell Mort: ‘Let’s forget it. Why are we doing this again?’ ” she said. “I had sort of given up.”

But, in a narrative for the U of L board of trustees, Petry said that “few ideas about the brain have been so influential” as Ungerleider and Mishkin’s, and that their original two publications in the early 1980s have been cited more than 5,000 times by other scientists.

“Like all great ideas, theirs continues to generate new insights and foster new debates,” Petry wrote.

As part of the award, the researchers will give a free public lecture April 10 at noon in Room 101 of Strickler Hall on U of L’s Belknap campus.

U of L gives four Grawemeyer Awards each year for works in music composition, improving world order, psychology and education. The university and Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary jointly give a fifth award in religion.

The late Louisville entrepreneur H. Charles Grawemeyer created the awards in 1984 with an initial endowment of $9.4 million.