Familial transmission of neural representations for mental arithmetic across two generations

Parental skills are among the most powerful predictors of children's outcomes. While distal genetic and environmental pathways likely contribute to skill transmission within families, much less is known about the proximal neural markers that support the transmission of cognitive functioning from parents to children. It is also unclear whether brain similarity between parents and children predicts similarity in cognitive skills. In this study, we used fMRI to measure brain activity associated with mental arithmetic-a task for which intergenerational transmission is consistently observed-in 37 familial dyads of 8-y-old children and their mothers. Regardless of familial ties, multivariate searchlight representational similarity analyses revealed remarkable adult-child similarity in the neural representations of a signature of arithmetic processing, the problem-size effect, within a broad occipito-parieto-frontal system. Comparing familial to nonfamilial adult-child dyads, family-specific transmission of neural representations was identified in the bilateral anterior insula and left precentral gyrus, key regions of the arithmetic processing network. Mother-child neural similarity in the insula and precentral gyrus interacted with maternal skillto predict mother-child similarity in math and working memory skills, such that neural similarity was more positively related to behavioral similarity in dyads with lower-skilled than higher-skilled mothers. Therefore, increased parent-child neural similarity may particularly predict shared cognitive abilities among dyads where parents experience greater difficulties. Our findings demonstrate that task-related intergenerational neuroimaging can identify brain regions involved in the intergenerational transmission of cognitive skills. They may have relevance for identifying neural markers of learning disabilities through familial transmission.