Educational attainment of parents is a strong predictor of the child´s later cognitive abilities including their intelligence quotient (IQ). Both father´s as well as mother´s education has been shown to be associated with cognitive ability of their offspring, but some studies suggest that this may vary by the sex of the parent. Cognitive ability has been proposed to be the result of large-scale brain networks and evidence points towards alterations in their resting state functional connectivity as its potential neural underpinning. Specifically, the salience network, which is believed to mediate information flow between cognitive and emotional systems, select and coordinate relevant stimuli, may be in particularly involved.
In our study, which was published in Scientific Reports in February 2023, we found that lower education of both mothers and fathers was associated with lower IQ of the offspring at age 8. However, only mother´s education was associated with the IQ of the offspring 20 years later. Lower mother´s education correlated with greater functional connectivity between the right rostral prefrontal cortex (which belongs to the salience network) and a cluster of voxels in the occipital cortex, which, in turn, was associated with lower IQ at age 28/29.
We conclude that the impact of parental education, particularly father´s, on offspring´s cognitive ability weakens during the lifecourse. Functional connectivity between the right rostral prefrontal cortex and occipital cortex may be a biomarker underlying the transmission of mother´s education on IQ of their offspring.